Let me tell you a story of To-Day,--very homely and narrow in its scope
and aim. Not of the To-Day whose significance in the history of humanity
only those shall read who will live when you and I are dead. Let us bear
the pain in silence, if our hearts are strong enough, while the nations
of the earth stand far off pitying. I have no word of this To-Day to
speak. I write from the border of the battle-field, and I find in it no
theme for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes. The shadow of death has
fallen on us; it chills the very heaven. No child laughs in my face as
I pass down the street. Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray;
only in the bitterness of endurance they say "in the morning, 'Would God
it were even!' and in the evening, 'Would God it were morning!'" Neither
I nor you have the prophet's vision to see the age as its meaning stands
written before God. Those who shall live when we are dead may tell their
children, perhaps, how, out of anguish and darkness such as the world
seldom has borne, the enduring morning evolved of the true world and the
true man. It is not clear to us. Hands wet with a brother's blood for
the Right, a slavery of intolerance, the hackneyed cant of men or
the bloodthirstiness of women, utter no prophecy to us of the great
To-Morrow of content and right that holds the world. Yet the To-Morrow
is there; if God lives, it is there. The voice of the meek Nazarene,
which we have deafened down as ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword
of the hour, renews the quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble
things. Let us go down and look for it. There is no need that we should
feebly vaunt and madden ourselves over our self-seen lights, whatever
they may be, forgetting what broken shadows they are of eternal truths
in that calm where He sits and with His quiet hand controls us.
Patriotism and Chivalry are powers in the tranquil, unlimited lives to
come, as well as here, I know; but there are less partial truths, higher
hierarchies who serve the God-man, that do not speak to us in bayonets
and victories,--Humility, Mercy, and Love. Let us not quite neglect
them, however humble the voices they use may be. Why, the very low glow
of the fire upon the hearth tells me something of recompense coming in
the hereafter,--Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare
hills trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing
fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing within;
God's slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen smoke-clouds from
the camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer ramparts of the Promised
Land. Do not call us traitors, then, who choose to be cool and silent
through the fever of the hour,--who choose to search in common things
for auguries of the hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in these
poor sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown mould, a
deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than warring evils or
truths. Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint that there
are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may
appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush when it is
over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which there shall be none
of the red glare of war,--only those homelier, subtler lights which we
have overlooked. If it prove to you that the sun of old times still
shines, and the God of old times still lives, is not that enough?
My story is very crude and homely, as I said,--only a rough sketch of
one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs"
sometimes,--a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for
yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to
call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it
pleases you best to find here: New England idyls delicately tinted;
passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances,
concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends
who have indenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something,
in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace,
to kindle and chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this
commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes
I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not see.
Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! Your
manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily
necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into this common,
every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a
great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even
its only end may appear to be your daily food. A great warfare, I think,
with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos. It has
its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent
battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs
sleep under every green hill-side.
You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war.
There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's
bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honor, for purer
triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach. Your enemy, Self,
goes with you from the cradle to the coffin; it is a hand-to-hand
struggle all the sad, slow way, fought in solitude,--a battle that began
with the first heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the
drops ooze out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you can
gain it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the
wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.
Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have known, and
how they conquered or were worsted in the fight. Very common lives, I
know,--such as are swarming in yonder market-place; yet I dare to call
them voices of God,--all!
My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.
An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it. It was a
ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the outside,--Knowles
& Co. You may have heard of the firm: they were large woollen
manufacturers: supplied the home market in Indiana for several years.
This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman. That is
not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the
operatives are chiefly women. In such establishments, women can fill
every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with
the hands for that.
The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very
legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who profess
to read character in chirography would decipher but little from these
cramped, quiet lines. Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she
was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her
writing, her dress, her face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that
her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere
absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her,
not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay
within, before careless passers-by. The first page has the date, in red
letters, _October 2, 1860_, largely and clearly written. I am sure the
woman's hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there is no
sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her, and she
was young, with no faith in herself. She did not look desperate, at
all,--a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed in brown.
There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the factory
was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the office they gave
her was only a small square closet in the seventh story. It had but one
window, which overlooked a back-yard full of dyeing vats. The sunlight
that did contrive to struggle in obliquely through the dusty panes and
cobwebs of the window had a sleepy odor of copperas latent in it. You
smelt it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought her up, had
laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for her. As soon
as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his heavy boots had
thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the frame-rooms.
Then she climbed up on the high office-stool (climbed, I said, for she
was a little, little thing) and went to work, opening the books, and
copying from one to the other as steadily, monotonously, as if she had
been used to it all her life. Here are the first pages: see how sharp
the angles are of the blue and black lines, how even the long columns:
one would not think, that, as the steel pen traced them out, it seemed
to be lining out her life, narrow and black. If any such morbid fancy
were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray it. The sordid,
hard figures seemed to her the types of the years coming, but she wrote
them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing better for her, so
she did not care. She finished soon: they had given her only an hour or
two's work for the first day. She closed the books, wiped the pens in a
quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down and examined her new home.
It was soon understood. There were the walls with their broken plaster,
showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches
with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his
way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the smoke
of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used
broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a
raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full
of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all,
except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole.
One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in
it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes
out at her, and then down at the mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his
cage,--left there, I suppose, by the departed Teagarden. That was all
inside. She looked out of the window. In it, as if set in a square
black frame, was the dead brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat
sitting on the scuttle. Going closer, two or three feet of sky appeared.
It looked as if it smelt of copperas, and she drew suddenly back.
She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the dull
picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish, hackneyed weariness
creeping into her brain; a curious feeling, that all her life before had
been a silly dream, and this dust, these desks and ledgers, were real,
--all that was real. It was her birthday; she was twenty. As she
happened to remember that, another fancy floated up before her, oddly
life-like: of the old seat she made for herself under the currant-bushes
at home when she was a child, and the plans she laid for herself when
she should be a woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the
middle of the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage. It was only a little
while ago since these things were more alive to her than anything else
in the world. The seat was under the currant-bushes still. Very little
time ago; but she was a woman now,--and, look here! A chance ray of
sunlight slanted in, falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool,
waking a stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to
chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears. She went to the
cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at. Standing there, if the
life coming rose up before her in that hard, vacant blare of sunlight,
she looked at it with the same still, waiting eyes, that told nothing.
The door opened at last, and a man came in,--Dr. Knowles, the principal
owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and, going to the desk,
turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work. An old man,
overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as he stood
erect, facing her.
"You can go now," he said, gruffly. "To-morrow you must wait for the
bell to ring, and go--with the rest of the hands."
A curious smile flickered over her face like a shadow; but she said
nothing. He waited a moment.
"So!" he growled, "the Howth blood does not blush to go down into the
slime of the gutter? is sufficient to itself?"
A cool, attentive motion,--that was all. Then she stooped to tie her
sandals. The old man watched her, irritated. She had been used to the
keen scrutiny of his eyes since she was a baby, so was cool under it
always. The face watching her was one that repelled most men: dominant,
restless, flushing into red gusts of passion, a small, intolerant eye,
half hidden in folds of yellow fat,--the eye of a man who would give to
his master (whether God or Satan) the last drop of his own blood, and
exact the same of other men.
She had tied her bonnet and fastened her shawl, and stood ready to go.
"Is that all you want?" he demanded. "Are you waiting to hear that your
work is well done? Women go through life as babies learn to walk,--a
mouthful of pap every step, only they take it in praise or love. Pap is
better. Which do you want? Praise, I fancy."
"Neither," she said, quietly brushing her shawl. "The work is well done,
I know."
The old man's eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he turned
to the books. He thought she had gone, but, hearing a slight clicking
sound, turned round. She was taking the chicken out of the cage.
"Let it alone!" he broke out, sharply. "Where are you going with it?"
"Home," she said, with a queer, quizzical face. "Let it smell the green
fields, Doctor. Ledgers and copperas are not good food for a chicken's
soul, or body either."
"Let it alone!" he growled. "You take it for a type of yourself, eh? It
has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the barnyard."
She opened the cage.
"I think I will take it."
"No," he said, quietly. "It has a master here. Not P. Teagarden. Why,
Margaret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars, "do you think
the God you believe in would have sent it here without a work to do?"
She looked up; there was a curious tremor in his flabby face, a shadow
in his rough voice.
"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost. Nothing is lost. Let it
alone."
"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage. "Only I think"----
"What, child?"
She glanced furtively at him.
"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"
He vouchsafed no answer. She waited to see his lip curl bitterly, and
then, amused, went down the stairs. She had paid him for his sneer.
The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great
staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory.
It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading
towns. This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard for
the vats in the middle. The ladders and passages she passed down were
on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she had to grope her way
sometimes. The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the
great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It
deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short
walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened
from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast,
dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. There was a crowd
of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the trucks
by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking. The smell
of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here.
She stopped, uncertain. One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who
stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff.
Margaret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen this one
before, as she passed,--a dark face, sullen, heavy-lipped, the hair cut
convict-fashion, close to the head. She thought, too, one of the men
muttered "jail-bird," jeering him for his forwardness. "Load for
Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung out a sharp voice behind her, and, as
she went into the street, a train of cars rushed into the hall to be
loaded, and men swarmed out of every corner,--red-faced and pale,
whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half
asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,--hands,
like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike the
manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,--good wages these
tight times." For nothing more? Some other meaning may have fallen
from their faces into this girl's quiet intuition in the instant's
glance,--cheerfuller, remoter aims, hidden in the most sensual
face,--homeliest home-scenes, low climbing ambitions, some delirium of
pleasure to come,--whiskey, if nothing better: aims in life like yours,
differing in degree, needing only to make them the same----did you say
what?
She had reached the street now,--a back-street, a crooked sort of lane
rather, running between endless piles of ware-houses. She hurried down
it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the country. It was a
long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of the town, where the
dwelling-houses were,--long rows of two-story bricks drabbled with
soot-stains. It was two years since she had been in the town.
Remembering this, and the reason why she had shunned it, she quickened
her pace, her face growing stiller than before. One might have fancied
her a slave putting on a mask, fearing to meet her master. The town,
being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly. She saw the expression on its
face better. It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by
hills. It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a
keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having shops in
the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are cottages in other
cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some deluded dreamer had
planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy
poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys,
playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old
dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes,
that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even
the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in
the hills, where the few field-people--Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen--
gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine and God's charity made the
day holy. These churches lifted their hard stone faces insolently,
registering their yearly alms in the morning journals. To be sure, the
back-seats were free for the poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the
windows, the carving of the arches, the very purity of the preacher's
style, said plainly that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye
of a needle than for a man in a red _warm-us_ to enter the kingdom of
heaven through that gate.
Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned aside,
and but half a river crept reluctant by; the hills were but bare banks
of yellow clay. There was a cinder-road leading through these. Margaret
climbed it slowly. The low town-hills, as I said, were bare, covered at
their bases with dingy stubble-fields. In the sides bordering the road
gaped the black mouths of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills,
under the town. Trade everywhere,--on the earth and under it. No wonder
the girl called it a hard, scraping world. But when the road had crept
through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinders, and turned into
the brown mould of the meadows,--turned its back on trade and the smoky
town, and speedily left it out of sight contemptuously, never looking
back once. This was the country now in earnest.
Margaret slackened her step, drawing long breaths of the fresh cold air.
Far behind her, panting and puffing along, came a black, burly figure,
Dr. Knowles. She had seen him behind her all the way, but they did not
speak. Between the two there lay that repellant resemblance which made
them like close relations,--closer when they were silent. You know such
people? When you speak to them, the little sharp points clash. Yet they
are the people whom you surely know you will meet in the life beyond
death, "saved" or not. The Doctor came slowly along the quiet
country-road, watching the woman's figure going as slowly before him. He
had a curious interest in the girl,--a secret reason for the interest,
which as yet he kept darkly to himself. For this reason he tried to
fancy how her new life would seem to her. It should be hard enough, her
work,--he was determined on that; her strength and endurance must be
tested to the uttermost. He must know what stuff was in the weapon
before he used it. He had been reading the slow, cold thing for
years,--had not got into its secret yet. But there was power there, and
it was the power he wanted. Her history was simple enough: she was going
into the mill to support a helpless father and mother; it was a common
story; she had given up much for them;--other women did the same. He
gave her scanty praise. Two years ago (he had keen, watchful eyes, this
man) he had fancied that the poor homely girl had a dream, as most women
have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside, he thought, forever;
it was too expensive a luxury; she had to begin the life-long battle for
bread and butter. Her dream had been real and pure, perhaps; for she
accepted no sham love in its place: if it had left an empty hunger in
her heart, she had not tried to fill it. Well, well, it was the old
story. Yet he looked after her kindly, as he thought of it; as some
people look sorrowfully at children, going back to their own childhood.
For a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her
work for life was hard enough. But no: this woman had been planned and
kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or mother. It was his
part to put her work into her hands.
The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out through
the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of the town never had
been heard of out there. It (the road) went wandering lazily through the
corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the woods,--the
low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way, touching the
grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet gold. Nobody in
such a road could be in a hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air,
the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one
could be sure of finding them the same a hundred years from now. Nobody
ever was in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when their work
was over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the roadside in a
voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered through the clover
by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it and sleeping
outright. The country-people, jogging along to the mill, walked their
fat old nags through the stillness and warmth so slowly that even
Margaret left them far behind. As the road went deeper into the hills,
the solitude and quiet grew even more penetrating and certain,--so
certain in these grand old mountains that one called them eternal, and,
looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew surer of a world
beyond this where there is neither change nor death.
It was growing late; the evening air grew more motionless and cool;
the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the
valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margaret
turned from the road and went down the fields. One did not wonder,
feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that this
woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still, with dark
questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.
Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had
left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of
them off her brain. No miles could measure the distance between her
home and them. At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting. She
hurried now, her cheek coloring. Dr. Knowles could see them going to the
house beyond, talking earnestly. He sat down in the darkening twilight
on the stile, and waited half an hour. He did not care to hear the story
of Margaret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and mother
would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It was nothing to her,
he knew. So he waited. After a while he heard the old man's laugh, like
that of a pleased child, and then went in and took her place beside him.
She went out, but came back presently, every grain of dust gone, in her
clear dress of pearl gray. The neutral tint suited her well. As she
stood by the window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and
waiting figure came into full relief. Nature had made this woman in a
freak of rare sincerity. There were no reflected lights about her: no
gloss on her skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on her soul.
Simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and her master alone to
conquer and understand. Her flesh was cold and colorless,--there were no
surface tints on it,--it warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her
voice was quiet,--out of her heart; her hair, the only beauty of the
woman, was lustreless brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I
saw such hair once, only once. It had been cut from the head of a man,
who, quiet and simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature, and
set the world at defiance,--Bysshe Shelley.
The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively, took in
every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus blade which he
was going to carry into battle. There was neither love nor scorn in
his look,--a mere fixedness of purpose to make use of her some day. He
talked, meanwhile, glancing at her now and then, as if the subject they
discussed were indirectly linked with his plan for her. If it were, she
was unconscious of it. She sat on the wooden step of the porch, looking
out on the melancholy sweep of meadow and hill range growing cool and
dimmer in the dun twilight, not hearing what they said, until the
sharpened, earnest tones roused her.
"You will fail, Knowles."
It was her father who spoke.
"Nothing can save such a scheme from failure. Neither the French nor
German Socialists attempted to base their systems on the lowest class,
as you design."
"I know," said Knowles. "That accounts for their partial success."
"Let me understand your plan practically," eagerly demanded her father.
She thought Knowles evaded the question,--wished to leave the subject.
Perhaps he did not regard the poor old schoolmaster as a practical judge
of practical matters. All his life he had called him thriftless and
unready.
"It never will do, Knowles," he went on in his slow way. "Any plan,
Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded on
self-government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of shams."
The old schoolmaster shook his head as one who knows, and tried to push
the thin gray hairs out of his eyes in a groping way. Margaret lifted
them back so quietly that he did not feel her.
"You'll call the Republic a sham next!" said the Doctor, coolly
aggravating.
"The Republic!" The old man quickened his tone, like a war-horse
scenting the battle near at hand. "There never was a thinner-crusted
Devil's egg in the world than democracy. I think I've told you that
before?"
"I think you have," said the other, dryly.
"You always were a Tory, Mr. Howth," said his wife, in her placid,
creamy way. "It is in the blood, I think, Doctor. The Howths fought
under Cornwallis, you know."
The schoolmaster waited until his wife had ended.
"Very true, Mrs. Howth," he said, with a grave smile. Then his thin face
grew hot again.
"No, Dr. Knowles. Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live
in. Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang
full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos.
And this republic is the culmination of chaos."
"Out of chaos came the new-born earth," suggested the Doctor.
"But its foundations were granite," rejoined the old man with nervous
eagerness,--"granite, not the slime of yesterday. When you found
empires, go to work as God worked."
The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark
indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were
some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the schoolmaster's flush
of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to
gibe it into life.
"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have? If the trodden rights of the human
soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to last?
On despotism? Civil or theocratic?"
"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs," replied
the schoolmaster.
The Doctor laughed.
"What a successful politician you would have made! You would have had
such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"
Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.
"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."
The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her,
without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. She was a
woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.
"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing
under their roundabouts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way.
'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the
warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of
nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory
of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great
archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, miserable failure!"
The Doctor did not hear. Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him than
the downfall of the Republic. What help did he seek in this girl? His
keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.
"No," Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,--"we left Order
back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the
world into the ditch."
"Comte!" growled the Doctor.
The schoolmaster's cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.
"You sneer at Comte? Because, having the clearest eye, the widest
sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more? It was to show how far
flesh can go alone. Could he help it, if God refused the prophet's
vision?"
"I'm sure, Samuel," interrupted his wife with a sorrowful earnestness,
"your own eyes were as strong as a man's could be. It was ten years
after I wore spectacles that you began. Only for that miserable fever,
you could read short-hand now."
Her own quiet eyes filled with tears. There was a sudden silence.
Margaret shivered, as if some pain stung her. Holding her father's bony
hand in hers, she patted it on her knee. The hand trembled a little.
Knowles's sharp eyes darted from one to the other; then, with a
smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed headlong into the old
battle which he and the schoolmaster had been waging now, off and on,
some six years. That was a fight, I can tell you! None of your shallow,
polite clashing of modern theories,--no talk of your Jeffersonian
Democracy, your high-bred Federalism! They took hold of the matter by
the roots, clear at the beginning.
Mrs. Howth's breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of the
matter in such a dangerous way. What if Joel should hear? No doubt he
would report that his master was an infidel,--that would be the next
thing they would hear. He was in the kitchen now: he finished his
wood-chopping an hour ago. Asleep, doubtless; that was one comfort.
Well, if he were awake, he could not understand. That class of
people----And Mrs. Howth (into whose kindly brain just enough of her
husband's creed had glimmered to make her say, "that class of people,"
in the tone with which Abraham would _not_ have spoken of Dives over the
gulf) went tranquilly back to her knitting, wondering why Dr. Knowles
should come ten times now where he used to come once, to provoke Samuel
into these wearisome arguments. Ever since their misfortune came on
them, he had been there every night, always at it. She should think he
might be a little more considerate. Mr. Howth surely had enough to think
of, what with his--his misfortune, and the starvation waiting for them,
and poor Margaret's degradation, (she sighed here,) without bothering
his head about the theocratic principle, or the Battle of Armageddon.
She had hinted as much to Dr. Knowles one day, and he had muttered out
something about its being "the life of the dog, Ma'am." She wondered
what he meant by that! She looked over at his bearish figure,
snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black hair. Well, poor man,
he could not help it, if he were coarse, and an Abolitionist, and
a Fourierite, and----She was getting a little muddy now, she was
conscious, so turned her mind back to the repose of her stocking.
Margaret took it very quietly, seeing her father flaming so. But
Margaret never had any opinions to express. She was not like the
Parnells: they were noted for their clear judgment. Mrs. Howth was a
Parnell.
"The combat deepens,--on, ye brave!"
The Doctor's fat, leathery face was quite red now, and his sentences
were hurled out in a sarcastic bass, enough to wither the marrow of a
weak man. But the schoolmaster was no weak man. His foot was entirely on
his native heath, I assure you. He knew every inch of the ground, from
the domination of the absolute faith in the ages of Fetichism, to its
pseudo-presentment in the tenth century, and its actual subversion in
the nineteenth. Every step. Our politicians might have picked up an idea
or two there, I should think! Then he was so cool about it, so skilful!
He fairly rubbed his hands with glee, enjoying the combat. And he was so
sure that the Doctor was savagely in earnest: why, any one with half an
ear could hear that! He did not see how, in the very heat of the fray,
his eyes would wander off listlessly. But Mr. Howth did not wander;
there was nothing careless or two-sided in the making of this man,--no
sham about him, or borrowing. They came down gradually, or out,--for, as
I told you, they dug into the very heart of the matter at first,--they
came out gradually to modern times. Things began to assume a more
familiar aspect. Spinoza, Fichte, Saint Simon,--one heard about them
now. If you could but have heard the schoolmaster deal with these his
enemies! With what tender charity for the man, what relentless vengeance
for the belief, he pounced on them, dragging the soul out of their
systems, holding it up for slow slaughter! As for Humanity, (how Knowles
lingered on that word, with a tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of
flesh!)--as for Humanity, it was a study to see it stripped and flouted
and thrown out of doors like a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a man
too child-hearted to kill a spider. It was pleasanter to hear him when
he defended the great Past in which his ideal truth had been faintly
shadowed. How he caught the salient tints of the feudal life! How the
fine womanly nature of the man rose exulting in the free picturesque
glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed! How he crowded in traits of
perfected manhood in the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to color
and weaken his argument, not seeing that he weakened it! How, when he
thought he had cornered the Doctor, he would color and laugh like a boy,
then suddenly check himself, lest he might wound him! A curious laugh,
genial, cheery,--bubbling out of his weak voice in a way that put you in
mind of some old and rare wine. When he would check himself in one of
these triumphant glows, he would turn to the Doctor with a deprecatory
gravity, and for a few moments be almost submissive in his reply. So
earnest and worn it looked then, the poor old face, in the dim light!
The black clothes he wore were so threadbare and shining at the knees
and elbows, the coarse leather shoes brought to so fine a polish! The
Doctor idly wondered who had blacked them, glancing at Margaret's
fingers.
There was a flower stuck in the buttonhole of the schoolmaster's coat, a
pale tea-rose. If Dr. Knowles had been a man of fine instincts, (which
his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might have thought it
was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed coat. A scholar,
a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a world too short. Old
and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs,
and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the knightly honor, to
the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to
other men. In the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity of
the child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and credulous,
on the mouth.
The Doctor had not spoken for a moment. It might be that he was careless
of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly decorated his old
faith, or it might be that even he, with the terrible intentness of a
real life-purpose in his brain, was touched by the picture of the far
old chivalry, dead long ago. The master's voice grew low and lingering
now. It was a labor of love, this. Oh, it is so easy to go back out of
the broil of dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that
old life where love and bravery stand eternal verities,--never to be
bought and sold in that dusty town yonder! To go back? To dream back,
rather. To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old master did,
whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it with name and deed
in the dim days of chivalry. Make a poem of it,--so much easier than to
make a life!
Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the
picture touched her. Was, then, she thought, this grand dead Past so
shallow to him? These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death
for the Holy Greal, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph
of their conflict over Self? These women, content to live in solitude
forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that?
Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and
happy,--why, this _was_ life,--this death! But did pain, and martyrdom,
and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone? The
homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of
moorland,--cold, unrevealing. It baffled the man that looked at it. He
shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs, broke
out in a thunder-gust at last.
"Dead days for dead men! The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble
than any of your piping troubadours. We have something better to fight
for than a vacant tomb."
The old man drew himself up haughtily.
"I know what you would say,--Liberty for the low and vile. It is a
good word. That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old
time,--Honor!"
Honor! I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion. Men
have had worse. Perhaps the Doctor thought this; for he rose abruptly,
and, leaning on the old man's chair, said, gently,--
"It is better, even here. Yet you poison this child's mind. You make her
despise To-Day; make honor live for her now."
"It does not," the schoolmaster said, bitterly. "The world's a failure.
All the great old dreams are dead. Your own phantom, your Republic, your
experiment to prove that all men are born free and equal,--what is it
to-day?"
Knowles lifted his head, looking out into the brown twilight. Some word
of pregnant meaning flashed in his eye and trembled on his lip; but he
kept it back. His face glowed, though, and the glow and strength gave to
the huge misshapen features a grand repose.
"You talk of To-Day," the old man continued, querulously. "I am tired of
it. Here is its type and history," touching a county newspaper,--"a fair
type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended
fact. Bargain and sale,--it taints our religion, our brains, our
flags,--yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest. Did you never hear of
those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were
neither faithful to God nor rebellious, caring only for themselves?"
He paused, fairly out of breath. Margaret looked up. Knowles was
silent. There was a smothered look of pain on the coarse face; the
schoolmaster's words were sinking deeper than he knew.
"No, father," said Margaret, hastily ending his quotation, "'_io non
averei creduto, che [vita] tanta n' avesse disfatta._'"
Skilful Margaret! The broil must have been turbid in the old man's brain
which the grand, slow-stepping music of the Florentine could not calm.
She had learned that long ago, and used it as a nurse does some old song
to quiet her pettish infant. His face brightened instantly.
"Do not believe, then, child," he said, after a pause. "It is a noble
doubt in Dante or in you."
The Doctor had turned away; she could not see his face. The angry scorn
was gone from the old master's countenance; it was bent with its
usual wistful quiet on the floor. A moment after he looked up with a
flickering smile.
"'_Onorate l' altissimo poeta!_'" he said, gently lifting his finger to
his forehead in a military fashion. "Where is my cane, Margaret? The
Doctor and I will go and walk on the porch before it grows dark."
The sun had gone down long before, and the stars were out; but no one
spoke of this. Knowles lighted the schoolmaster's pipe and his own
cigar, and then moved the chairs out of their way, stepping softly that
the old man might not hear him. Margaret, in the room, watched them as
they went, seeing how gentle the rough, burly man was with her father,
and how, every time they passed the sweet-brier, he bent the branches
aside, that they might not touch his face. Slow, childish tears came
into her eyes as she saw it; for the schoolmaster was blind. This had
been their regular walk every evening, since it grew too cold for them
to go down under the lindens. The Doctor had not missed a night since
her father gave up the school, a month ago: at first, under pretence of
attending to his eyes; but since the day he had told them there was no
hope of cure, he had never spoken of it again. Only, since then, he had
grown doubly quarrelsome,--standing ready armed to dispute with the old
man every inch of every subject in earth or air, keeping the old man in
a state of boyish excitement during the long, idle days, looking forward
to this nightly battle.
It was very still; for the house, with its half-dozen acres, lay in an
angle of the hills, looking out on the river, which shut out all
distant noises. Only the men's footsteps broke the silence, passing
and repassing the window. Without, the October starlight lay white and
frosty on the moors, the old barn, the sharp, dark hills, and the river,
which was half hidden by the orchard. One could hear it, like some huge
giant moaning in his sleep, at times, and see broad patches of steel
blue glittering through the thick apple-trees and the bushes. Her mother
had fallen into a doze. Margaret looked at her, thinking how sallow the
plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue eyes were now.
Dim with crying,--she knew that, though she never saw her shed a tear.
Always cheery and quiet, going placidly about the house in her gray
dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such things in the world as
debt or blindness. But Margaret knew, though she said nothing. When her
mother came in from those wonderful foraging expeditions in search of
late pease or corn, she could see the swollen circle round the eyes,
and hear her breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired.
Then, one night, when she had gone late into her mother's room, the blue
eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if staring down into years of
starvation and misery. The fire on the hearth burned low and clear; the
old worn furniture stood out cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a
maze of twisted shadow on the floor. But the glow was all that was
cheerful. To-morrow, when the hard daylight should jeer away the
screening shadows, it would unbare a desolate, shabby home. She knew;
struck with the white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded
hangings, the old stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields
with a pitiful significance of loss. Upon the mantel-shelf there was a
small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other two were gone,
gone in pledge. This one was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out
her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond. For a
moment, so empty and bitter seemed her home and her life, that she
thought the lonely dancer with her flaunting joy mocked her,--taunted
them with the slow, gray desolation that had been creeping on them for
years. Only for a moment the morbid fancy hurt her.
The red glow was healthier, suited her temperament better. She chose to
fancy the house as it had been once,--should be again, please God.
She chose to see the old comfort and the old beauty which the poor
schoolmaster had gathered about their home. Gone now. But it should
return. It was well, perhaps, that he was blind, he knew so little of
what had come on them. There, where the black marks were on the wall,
there had hung two pictures. Margaret and her father religiously
believed them to be a Tintoret and Copley. Well, they were gone now. He
had been used to dust them with a light brush every morning, himself,
but now he said,--
"You can clean the pictures to-day, Margaret. Be careful, my child."
And Margaret would remember the greasy Irishman who had tucked them
under his arm, and flung them into a cart, her blood growing hotter in
her veins.
It was the same through all the house; there was not a niche in the bare
rooms that did not recall a something gone,--something that should
return. She willed that, that evening, standing by the dim fire. What
women will, whose eyes are slow, attentive, still, as this Margaret's,
usually comes to pass.
The red fire-glow suited her; another glow, warming her floating fancy,
mingled with it, giving her quiet purpose the trait of heroism. The
old spirit of the dead chivalry, of succor to the weak, life-long
self-denial,--did it need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament to
call it into life? Down in that trading town, in the thick of its mills
and drays, it could live, she thought. That very night, perhaps, in some
of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of
purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old
aspirants for knighthood. She, too,--her quiet face stirred with a
simple, childish smile, like her father's.
"Why, mother!" she said, stroking down the gray hair under the cap,
"shall you sleep here all night?" laughing.
A cheery, tender laugh, this woman's was,--seldom heard,--not far from
tears.
Mrs. Howth roused herself. Just then, a broad, high-shouldered man, in
a gray flannel shirt, and shoes redolent of the stable, appeared at the
door. Margaret looked at him as if he were an accusing spirit,--coming
down, as every woman must, from heights of self-renunciation or bold
resolve, to an undarned stocking or an uncooked meal.
"Kittle's b'ilin'," he announced, flinging in the information as a
general gratuity.
"That will do, Joel," said Mrs. Howth.
The tone of stately blandness which Mrs. Howth erected as a shield
between herself and "that class of people" was a study: a success, I
think; the _résumé_ of her experience in the combat that had devoured
half her life, like that of other American housekeepers. "Be gentle,
but let them know their place, my dear!" The class having its type and
exponent in Joel stopped at the door, and hitched up its suspenders.
"That will _do_, Joel," with a stern suavity.
Some idea was in Joel's head under the brush of red hair,--probably the
"anarchic element."
"Uh was wishin' toh read the G'zette." Whereupon he advanced into the
teeth of the enemy and bore off the newspaper, going before Margaret,
as she went to the kitchen, and seating himself beside a flaring
tallow-candle on the table.
Reading, with Joel, was not the idle pastime that more trivial minds
find it: a thing, on the contrary, to be gone into with slow spelling,
and face knitted up into savage sternness, especially now, when, as he
gravely explained to Margaret, "in _his_ opinion the crissis was jest at
hand, and ev'ry man must be seein' ef the gover'ment was carryin' out
the views of the people."
With which intent, Joel, in company with five thousand other sovereigns,
consulted, as definitive oracle, "The Daily Gazette" of Towbridge. The
schoolmaster need not have grumbled for the old time: feudality in the
days of Warwick and of "The Daily Gazette" was not so widely different
as he and Joel thought.
Now and then, partly as an escape-valve for his overcharged conviction,
partly in compassion to the ignorance of women in political economics,
he threw off to Margaret divers commentaries on the text, as she passed
in and out.
If she had risen to the full level of Joel's views, she might have
considered these views tinctured with radicalism, as they consisted in
the propriety of the immediate "impinging of the President." Besides,
(Joel was a good-natured man, too, merciful to his beast,) Nero-like, he
wished, with the tiger drop of blood that lies hid in everybody's heart,
that the few millions who differed with himself and the "Gazette" had
but one neck for their more convenient hanging. "It's all that'll save
the kentry," he said, and believed it, too.
If Margaret fell suddenly from the peak of outlook on life to the
homely labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush of
the knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I think. It
brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its cracked stove and
meagre array of tins; she bustled about in her quaint way, as if it
had been filled up and running over with comforts. It brightened and
reddened her face when she came in to put the last dish on the table,--a
cozy, snug table, set for four. Heroic dreams with poets, I suppose,
make them unfit for food other than some feast such as Eve set for the
angel. But then Margaret was no poet. So, with the kindling of her hope,
its healthful light struck out, and warmed and glorified these common
things. Such common things! Only a coarse white cloth, redeemed by
neither silver nor china, the amber coffee, (some that Knowles had
brought out to her father,--"thrown on his hands; he couldn't use
it,--product of slave-labor!--never, Sir!") the delicate brown fish that
Joel had caught, the bread her mother had made, the golden butter,--all
of them touched her nerves with a quick sense of beauty and pleasure.
And more, the gaunt face of the blind old man, his bony hand trembling
as he raised the cup to his lips, her mother and the Doctor managing
silently to place everything he liked best near his plate. Wasn't it
all part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in her consciousness? It
brightened and deepened. It blotted out the hard, dusty path of the
future, and showed warm and clear the success at the end. Not much
to show, you think. Only the old home as it once was, full of quiet
laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear shining again; only
that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man anything but courtesy.
The glow deepened, as she thought of it. It was strange, too, that, with
the deep, slow-moving nature of this girl, she should have striven so
eagerly to throw this light over the future. Commoner natures have done
more and hoped less. It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labor of
a life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic. She knew it. Yet, if there
lay in this coming labor any pain, any wearing effort, she clung to it
desperately, as if this should banish, it might be, worse loss. She
tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end,
to make happiness out of it, to give it to her silent hungry heart to
feed on. She thrust out of sight all possible life that might have
called her true self into being, and clung to this present shallow duty
and shallow reward. Pitiful and vain so to cling! It is the way of
women. As if any human soul could bury that which might have been in
that which is!
The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes, heeded
the transient flush of enthusiasm but little. Even the pleasant cheery
talk that pleased her father so was but surface-deep, he knew. The woman
he must conquer for his great end lay beneath, dark and cold. It was
only for that end he cared for her. Through what cold depths of solitude
her soul breathed faintly mattered little. Yet an idle fancy touched
him, what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be, who had
held the master-key to a nature so rare as this, who had the kingly
power in his hand to break its silence into electric shivers of laughter
and tears,--terrible subtle pain, or joy as terrible. Did he hold the
power still, he wondered? Meanwhile she sat there quiet, unread.
The evening came on, slow and cold. Life itself, the Doctor thought,
impatiently, was cool and tardy here among the hills. Even he fell into
the tranquil tone, and chafed under it. Nowhere else did the evening
gray and sombre into the mysterious night impalpably as here. The quiet,
wide and deep, folded him in, forced his trivial heat into silence and
thought. The world seemed to think there. Quiet in the dead seas of fog,
that filled the valleys like restless vapor curdled into silence; quiet
in the listening air, stretching gray up to the stars,--in the solemn
mountains, that stood motionless, like hoary-headed prophets, waiting
with uplifted hands, day and night, to hear the Voice, silent now
for centuries; the very air, heavy with the breath of the sleeping
pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like some human voice weary with
preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on earth. This man's heart
was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling
mockery to a sick and hungry world,--a dead torpor of indifference.
Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret
of the night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with
the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him in, to
accept the great prophetic calm. He was blind to the prophecy written on
the earth since the day God first bade it tell thwarted man of the great
To-Morrow.
He turned from the night in-doors. Human hearts were his proper study.
The old house, he thought, slept with the rest. One did not wonder that
the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. The frantic, nervous
haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human life. Yet
life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows
and joys were few and life-long. The slow, enduring air suited this
woman, Margaret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden
gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one
current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the
other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should
be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his aim high, the
highest? It was his right.
Margaret, looking up, saw the man's intolerant eye fixed on her. She met
it coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak,
had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her apathy, her
childish, dreamy quiet, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge
of impatient contempt. What did he want now with her? Her duty was
light; she took it up,--she was glad to take it up; what more would he
have? She put the whole matter away from her.
It grew late. She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her father,
as usual. Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in half-asleep;
the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as he did
everything else, intently. It was an old story that she read,--the story
of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen
hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the
silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air
stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a
deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and this solemn sky than to
the purblind hearts within. It was a dim, far-off story to them,--very
far off. The old schoolmaster heard it with a lowered head, with the
proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader's orders.
Was not the leader a knight, the knight of truest courage? All that was
high, chivalric in the old man sprang up to own him Lord. That he not
only preached to, but ate and drank with publicans and sinners, was a
requirement of his mission; nowadays----. Joel heard the "good word"
with a bewildered consciousness of certain rules of honesty to be
observed the next day, and a maze of crowns and harps shining somewhere
beyond. As for any immediate connection between the teachings of this
book and "The Daily Gazette," it was pure blasphemy to think of it. The
Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of course; but as for the election
next month, that was quite another thing. If Joel thrust the history out
of the touch of common life, the Doctor brought it down, and held it
there on trial. To him it was the story of a Reformer who had served
his day. Could he serve this day? Could he? The need was desperate. Was
there anything in this Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out
the awful problem which the ages had left for America to solve? People
called this old Knowles an infidel, said his brain was as unnatural and
distorted as his body. God, looking down into his heart that night, saw
the fierce earnestness of the man to know the truth, and judged him with
other eyes than ours.
When the girl had finished reading, she went out and stood in the cool
air. The Doctor passed her without notice. The story stood alive in his
throbbing brain, demanding a hearing; it stood there always, needing but
a touch to waken it. All things were real to this man, this uncouth mass
of flesh that his companions sneered at; most real of all the unhelped
pain of life, the great seething mire of dumb wretchedness in our
streets and alleys, the cry for aid from the starved souls of the world.
You and I have other work to do than to listen,--pleasanter. But this
man, coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a
despised race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him: it was the
most real thing on earth to him,--more real than his own share in the
unseen heaven or hell. By the reality, the peril of the world's instant
need, he tried the offered help from Calvary. It was the work of years,
not of this night. Perhaps, if they who preach Christ crucified had
first doubted and tried him as this man did, their place in the coming
heaven might be higher,--and ours, who hear them.
He went, in his lumbering way, down the hill into the city. He was glad
to go back; the trustful, waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him. It sent
him back more mad against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its
great pity. Let him go back into the great city, with its stifling
gambling-hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars. It is his place and
work. If he stumble blindly against unconquerable ills, and die, others
have so stumbled and so died. Do you think their work is lost?
* * * * *
TIME'S HOUSEHOLD.
Time is a lowly peasant, with whom bred
Are sons of kings, of an immortal race.
Their garb to their condition they debase,
Eat of his fare, make on his straw their bed,
Conversing, use his homely dialect,
(Giving the words some meaning of their own,)
Till, half forgetting purple, sceptre, throne,
Themselves his children mere they nigh suspect.
And when, divinely moved, one goes away,
His royal right and glory to resume,
Loss of his rags appears his life's decay,
He weeps, and his companions mourn his doom.
Yet doth a voice in every bosom say,
"So perish buds while bursting into bloom."
WHAT WE ARE COMING TO.
In the year 1745 Charles Edward Stuart landed in the wilds of Moidart
and set up the standard of rebellion. The Kingdom of Scotland was then,
in nearly all but political rights, an independent nation. A very large
part of its population was of different blood from that of the southern
portion of the British Island. The Highland clans were as distinct in
manners, disposition, and race from their English neighbors as are the
Indian tribes remaining in our midst from the men of Massachusetts and
New York. They held to the old religion, the cardinal principle of which
is to admit the right of no other form, and which never has obtained the
upper hand without immediately attempting to put down all rivalry. They
were devotedly attached to their chiefs. They represented a patriarchal
system. They lived by means of a little agriculture and a great deal of
plunder. They were bred to arms, and despised every other calling. The
whole country of Scotland was possessed with an inextinguishable spirit
of nationality, stronger than that of Hungary or Poland. They were
traditional allies of France, the hereditary foe of England. Seven
hundred years of fighting had filled the border-land with battle-fields,
some of glorious and some of mournful memory, on which the Cross of
Saint Andrew had been matched against that of Saint George. Some of the
noblest families of the realm had won their knightly spurs and their
ancient earldoms by warlike prowess against the Southron. Flodden and
Bannockburn were household words, as potent as Agincourt and Cressy. Nor
had the conduct of the House of Hanover been such as to conciliate the
unwilling people. There was known to be a widespread disaffection even
in England to the German princes. These had governed their adopted for
the benefit of their native country. The sentiment of many counties was
thoroughly Jacobite. A corrupt and venal administration was filled with
secret adherents of the king over the water. One great university was in
sympathy with the fallen dynasty. A large part of the Church was imbued
with doctrines of divine right and passive obedience, of which the only
logical conclusion was the return of the Stuarts.
Between the two countries there was an antagonism of customs, of
manners, of character, more marked, more offensively displayed, and
breeding more rancorous hatred than any which can now exist between the
people of Boston and Charleston, between the Knickerbockers of New
York and the Creoles of New Orleans. A Scotchman was to the South a
comprehensive name for a greedy, beggarly adventurer, knavish and
money-loving to the last degree, full of absurd pride of pedigree,
clannish and cold-blooded, vindictive as a Corsican, and treacherous
as a modern Greek. An Englishman was to the North a bullying, arrogant
coward,--purse-proud, yet cringing to rank,--without loyalty and without
sentiment,--given over to mere material interests, not comprehending the
idea of honor, and believing, as the fortieth of his religious articles,
that any injury, even to a blow, could be compensated by money.
Into an island thus divided the heir of the ancient family to whom in
undoubted right of legitimacy the crown belonged, a young, gallant, and
handsome prince, had thrown himself with a chivalrous confidence
that touched every heart. There was every reason to suppose that the
interests of England's powerful enemy across the Channel were secretly
pledged to sustain his cause. Scotland was soon ablaze with sympathy and
devotion. The Prince advanced on Edinburgh. The city opened its gates.
He was acknowledged, and held his court in the old Palace of Holyrood,
where generation after generation of Stuarts had maintained their state.
The castle alone, closely beleaguered, held out like our own Sumter in
the centre of rebellion. A battle was fought almost beneath the walls of
the Scotch capital, and the first great army upon which the English hope
depended was ignominiously routed. A portion of the soldiery fled in
disgraceful panic; those who stood were cut to pieces by the charges
of a fiery valor against which discipline seemed powerless. The border
fortress of Carlisle was soon after taken. Liverpool, not the great
commercial port it now is, but of rising importance, and Manchester,
were menaced. Even London was in dismay. Men like Horace Walpole wrote
to their friends of a retreat to the garrets of Hanover. The funds fell.
The leading minister had been a man of eminently pacific policy, whose
chief state-maxim was _Quieta non movere_, and was taken by surprise.
There are many historians and students of history who now admit,
in looking back upon those times, that the fate of the established
government hung upon a thread, and that the daring advance of the
Pretender followed by another victory might have converted him into a
Possessor and Defender. Had any one then asked as to the possibilities
of a reconstruction of the severed Union, the answer would probably
have been not much unlike the predictions of the croakers of to-day who
clamor for acceptance of the Davisian olive-branch and an acknowledgment
of the fact of Secession. Yet the strength of numbers, of means, and of
public sentiment was altogether on the English side. Though paralyzed
somewhat by the sense of private treachery, with the feeling that all
branches of the public service were harboring men of doubtful loyalty,
and the knowledge that a great body of "submissionists" were ready
to acquiesce in the course of events, whatever that might be, the
Government prepared for an unconditional resistance. _From the outset
they treated it as a rebellion, and the adherents of the Stuarts as
rebels_. Time, the ablest of generals and wisest of statesmen, happened
to be on their side. The Pretender turned northward from Derby, and on
the field of Culloden the last hope of the exiled house was forever
broken. Yet it would even then seem as if reconstruction had been
rendered impossible. The Chevalier escaped to France, guarded by the
fond loyalty of men and women who defied alike torture and temptation.
While he lived, or the family remained, the danger continued to threaten
England, and the heart of Scotland to be fevered with a secret hope.
The old conflict of nationalities had been terribly envenomed by the
cruelties of Cumberland and the license of the conquering troops. There
was the same temptation ever lurking at the ear of France to whisper new
assaults upon England. Ireland was held as a subjugated province, and
was in a state of chronic discontent. To either wing of the British
empire, alliance with, nay, submission to France, was considered
preferable to remaining in the Union.
Thus far we have been looking at probabilities from the stand-point of
their times. There is a curious parallelism in the essentials of that
conflict with the present attempt to elevate King Cotton to the throne
of this Republic. It is close enough to show that the same great
rules have hitherto governed human action with unerring fidelity. The
Government displayed at the outset the same vacillation; the people were
apparently as thoroughly indifferent to the Hanoverian cause as the
Northern merchants, before the fall of Sumter, to the prosperity of
Lincoln's administration. The Russell of 1745, writing to the French
court his views of the public sentiment of England and especially of
London, probably gave an account of it not very dissimilar to that
which the Russell of 1861 wrote to the London "Times" after his first
encounter with the feeling of New York. There were doubtless the same
assurances on the part of confident partisans that the whole framework
of the British government would crumble at the first attack. There were,
too, the same extravagant alarms, the same wild misrepresentations, the
same volunteer enthusiasm on the part of loyal subjects a little
later on in the history. There was on the part of the rebels the same
confidence in the justice of their cause, the same utter blindness to
results, as in the devotees of Slavery. There was then, as now, an
educated and cultivated set of plotters, moved by personal ambition,
swaying with almost absolute power the minds of an ignorant and
passionate class. It was the combat so often begun in the world, yet so
inevitably ending always in the same way, between misguided enthusiasm
and the great public conviction of the value of order, security, and
peace.
The enmity seemed hopeless; the insurrection was a smouldering fire,
put out in one corner only to be renewed in another. If Virginia is a
country in which a guerrilla resistance can be indefinitely prolonged,
it is more open than the plains of Holland in comparison with
the Highlands of that era. Few Lowlanders had ever penetrated
them,--scarcely an Englishman. It was supposed that in those impregnable
fastnesses an army of hundreds might defy the thousands of the crown. At
Killiecrankie, Dundee and his Highlanders had beaten a well-appointed
and superior force. Dundee had himself been repulsed by a handful of
Covenanters at Loudoun Heath through the strength of their position.
Montrose had carried on a partisan war against apparently hopeless odds.
To overrun England might be a mad ambition, but to stand at bay in
Scotland was a thing which had been again and again attempted with no
inconsiderable success.
The rebellion failed, and there were several causes for the failure:
Dissensions among the rebels, the want of efficient aid from France,
the want of money, _and the conviction of a large part of the Scots
themselves of the value of the Union_. The rebellion failed, and sullen
submission to confiscation, military cruelty, and political proscription
followed.
On Sunday, the 18th of June, 1815, not quite seventy years after, there
charged side by side upon the _élite_ of a French army, with the men of
London, the Highlanders and Irish. A descendant of Cameron of Lochiel
fell leading them on. The last spark of Jacobite enthusiasm and Scottish
hatred of Englishmen had died out years before. Those who witnessed the
entry of the Chevalier into Edinburgh lived to see the whole nation
devouring with enthusiasm the novel of "Waverley,"--so entirely had the
bitterness of what had happened "sixty years since" passed from their
minds!
We have thus selected two points of history as the short answer to the
cry, "You can never reconstruct the Union," which History, the impartial
judge on the bench, pronounces to the wranglers at the bar below.
"Never" is a long word to speak, if it be a short one to spell. Events
move fast, and the logic of Fate is more convincing than the arguments
of daily editors. The "_tout arrive en France_" is true of the world in
general, so far as relates to isolated circumstances. The very fact that
a threatened disruption of our Union has been possible ought to forbid
any one from concluding that reconstruction, or rather restoration, is
impossible. Twenty years after the Battle of Culloden, Jacobitism was a
dream; fifty years after, it was a memory; a century after, it was an
antiquarian study.
The real question we are to ask concerning the present rebellion, and
the only one which is of importance, is, What is it based upon? an
eternal or an arbitrary principle? An eternal principle renews itself
till it succeeds,--if not in one century, then in another. An arbitrary
principle makes its fierce fight and then is slain, and men bury it as
soon as they can. The Stuarts represented an arbitrary principle. They
were the impersonation of unconstitutional power. Hereditary right
they had, and the Hanoverians had not. According to Mr. Thackeray, and
according to the strictest fact, we suspect the Georges were no
more personally estimable than the Jameses, and they were far less
kingly-mannered. But they were willing to govern England according to
law, and the Stuarts wore determined to govern according to prerogative.
What is the present issue? It is a contest, when reduced to its ultimate
terms, between free labor and slavery. It is very true that this
secession was planned before slavery considered itself aggrieved,
before abolitionism became a word of war. But the antipathy between
the slaveholder and the payer or receiver of wages was none the less
radical. The systems were just as hostile. We admit that the South can
make out its title of legitimacy. It has a slave population it must take
care of and is bound to take care of till somebody can tell what better
to do with it. It can show a refined condition of its highest society,
which contrasts not unfavorably with the tawdry display and vulgar
ostentation of the _nouveaux riches_ whom sudden success in trade or
invention has made conspicuous at the North. There is a fascination
about the Southern life and character which charms those who do not look
at it too closely into ardent championship. Even Mr. Russell, so long as
he looked into white faces in South Carolina, was fascinated, and only
when he came to look into black faces along the Mississippi found the
disenchantment. The decisive difference is, that the North is purposing
to settle and possess this land according to the law of right, and the
South according to the law of might.
We say, therefore, that the issue of the contest need not be doubtful.
The events of it may be very uncertain, but, from the parallel we have
sketched, we think we can indicate the four chief causes of the Scottish
failure as existing in the present crisis.
DISSENSIONS AMONG THE REBELS. These of course are hid from us by the
veil of smoke that rises above Bull Run. But as between the party of
advance and the party of defence, between the would-be spoilers of New
York bank-vaults and Philadelphia mint-coffers, and the more prudent who
desire "to be let alone," there is already an issue created. There are
State jealousies, and that impatience of control which is inherent in
the Southern mind, as it was in that of the Highland chieftains. There
will be, as events move on, the same feud developed between the Palmetto
of Carolina and the Pride-of-China of the Georgian, as then burned
between Glen-Garry of that ilk and Vich Ian Vohr. There are rivalries of
interest quite as fierce as those which roused the anti-tariff _furor_
of Mr. Calhoun. Much as Great Britain may covet the cotton of South
Carolina, she will not be disposed to encourage Louisiana to a
competition in sugar with her own Jamaica. Virginia will hardly brook
the opening of a rival Dahomey which shall cheapen into unprofitableness
her rearing of slaves. While fighting is to be done, these questions are
in abeyance; but so soon as men come to ask what they are fighting
for, they revive. There is selfishness inherent in the very idea of
secession.
There is a capital story, we think, in the "Gesta Romanorum," of three
thieves who have robbed a man of a large sum of gold. They propose a
carouse over their booty, and one is sent to the town to buy wine. While
he is gone, the two left behind plot to murder him on his return, so
as to have a half instead of a third to their shares. He, meanwhile,
coveting the whole, buys poison to put into the wine. They cut his
throat and sit down to drinking, which soon finishes them. It is an
admirable illustration of the probable future of successful secession.
Something very like this ruined the cause of James III., and something
not unlike it may be even now damaging the cause of H.S.I.M.,--His
Sea-Island Majesty, Cotton the First.
THE WANT OF EFFICIENT AID FROM ABROAD. We are not yet quite out of the
woods, and it behooveth us not to halloo that we certainly have found
the path. But it is more than probable that the Southern hope of English
or French aid has failed. Either nation by itself might be won over but
for the other. He is a bold and a good charioteer who can drive those
two steeds in double harness.
Either without the other is simply an addition of _x--x_ to the
equation. If by next November we can get a single cotton-port open, we
shall have settled that Uncle Tom and the Duchess of Sutherland may
return to the social cabinet of Great Britain,--and that being so, the
political cabinet is of small account.
With the want of foreign aid comes the next want, that of MONEY. The
Emperor of Austria has a convenient currency in his dominions, which
you can carry in sheets and clip off just what you need. But cross a
frontier and the very beggars' dogs turn up their noses at the _K.K.
Schein-Münze_. The Virginian and other Confederate scrip appears to be
at par of exchange with Austrian bank-notes,--in fact, of the same worth
as that "Brandon Money" of which Sol. Smith once brought away a hatful
from Vicksburg, and was fain to swap it for a box of cigars. The South
cannot long hold out under the wastefulness of war, unless relief come.
"With bread and gunpowder one may go anywhere," said Napoleon,--but with
limited hoecake and _no_ gunpowder, even Governor Wise would wisely
retreat.