It was not Laidley who entered, but Mrs. Combe, then the most-famous
clairvoyant in the United States. According to statements of men both
shrewd and honest she had lately succeeded in bringing the dead back to
them in actual bodily presence. The voice was heard, then the spirit
slowly grew into matter beside them. They could feel and see its warm
flesh, its hair and clothing, and even while they held it it melted
again into the impalpable air, and was gone. The account was attested by
persons of such integrity and prominence as to command attention from
scientific men. They knew, of course, that it was a trick, but the trick
must be so well managed as to be worth the trouble of exposure. Hence,
Mrs. Combe upon her entrance was received with silent, keen attention.
She was a tall pillar-like woman, with some heavy drapery of black
velvet or cloth about her: there were massive coils of coarse black
hair, dead narrow eyes of the same color, a closely-shut jaw: no point
of light in the figure, but a rope of unburnished gold about her neck.
She stood with her hands dropped at her sides, immovable, while her
husband, a greasy little manikin with a Jewish face, turned on the light
and waved the attention of the audience to her: "This is Miriam Combe,
the first person since the Witch of Endor who has succeeded in
materializing the shpirits of the dead. Our meeting here to-day is under
peculiar shircumstances. A zhentleman unknown to me and Mrs. Combe, but
who, I am told, is near death, desires to recall the shpirit of a dead
friend. Zhentlemans will reconize the fact that the thing we propose to
do depends upon the states of minds and matters about us. If these
elements are disturbed by unbelief or by too much light or noise when
the soul shtruggling to return wants silence and darkness, why--it
cannot make for itself a body--dat's all."
"You compel belief, in a word, before you prove to us that we ought to
believe," said a professor from a Baptist college in New Jersey, smiling
blandly down upon him. "Scientifically--"
"I knows noting of scientifics. I knows dat my wife hash de power to
ashist de souls to clode demselves wid matter. I don't pretend to
explain where she got dat power, I don't know what ish dat power: I only
know she hash it. If zhentlemans will submit to the conditions, they
shall zhoodge for demselves."
"Now, the ignorance of this man impresses me favorably," said the
professor to his friends. "He is evidently incapable of inventing a
successful trick even of conjuring. If any great unknown force of Nature
has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the
manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the
steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."
Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head
solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is
vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt,
gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable
phenomena of the nineteenth century."
"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. "But the
stage-properties are bad: the velvet is cotton, and the gold
brass-gilt."
"Now, to me," said the judge emphatically, "there is a dreadful reality,
a dead look, in her face. What Poe would have made of this scene! There
was a man who could grapple with these supreme mysteries! No! that woman
undoubtedly has learned the secret of life and of death. She can afford
to be passive." The judge's very whisper was judicial, though pulpy.
It was not possible that the woman should have heard them, yet a moment
after she lifted her eyes and motioned slowly toward them.
"God bless my soul, ma'am! You don't want me!" cried the judge.
Waring half rose, laughing, but with cold chills down his backbone, and
then dropped into his seat, relieved: "You are the chosen victim, Miss
Fleming."
Cornelia went up to the medium. She was confident the whole affair was a
vulgar trick, but there was a stricture at her heart as if an iron hand
had been laid upon it. The energy went out of her step, the blood from
her face.
The woman laid her hand on her arm. "I need you," she said in a deep
voice. "You have great magnetic force: you can aid this soul to return
to life if you will. Sit there." She placed both her hands lightly on
Cornelia's forehead. Miss Fleming dropped into the seat: she could not
have done otherwise.
"Before we opens the seance," proceeded Combe, "zhentlemans can examine
de cabinet and convince demselves dere is no trick."
The cabinet was a light triangular structure of black walnut, about
seven feet in height, placed in one corner of the room, though with an
open space between it and the wall. It moved on casters: the door was on
the side facing the audience. Miss Fleming observed with amusement that
the seat given her removed her to the farthest distance from this door.
"You will notish dat dere is absolutely noting in de cabinet but a
chair--zhoost de walls and de floor and de chair. Miriam will sit there,
and de door will be closed. When it opens you will see de embodied
spirit beside her."
"Hillo!" cried the judge, "what's this behind the cabinet?"
"It is a window overlooking de garden: I had it boarded up to prevent
you sushpecting me of trickery. But you sushpect mine boards, mein
Gott! Exshamine dem, exshamine dem! Go outside."
The judge did so. "They are screwed on honestly enough," he said to the
spectators. "A ghost had need of a battering-ram to come through that
window. It opens on an area thirty feet deep."
The woman went into the cabinet and the door was closed. Steps were
heard upon the stairs.
"It ish de zhentleman who calls for de shpirit to appear," said Combe in
a whisper.
The door opened, and Laidley, supported by Captain Swendon, entered,
giving a quick appealing look about him as he halted for a moment on the
threshold. The dignity of approaching death was in his weak, ghastly
face, and the judge rose involuntarily, just as he would have stood
uncovered if a corpse had gone by. Laidley took the seat which the
captain with his usual bluster placed for him opposite the door of the
cabinet. Combe turned out the lights: the room was in absolute darkness.
The judge moved uneasily near to Waring: "Don't laugh at me, Mr. Waring.
But I really feel that there is a Presence in this room which is not
human. I wish I had listened to my wife. She does not approve of this
sort of thing at all: she thinks no good churchman should meddle with
it. But there is _something_ in the room."
"Yes, I am conscious of what you mean. But it is a physical force, not
spiritual. Not electricity, either. It is something which has never
affected my senses before. Whatever it is, it is the stock in trade of
these people."
They were ordered by Combe to join hands, and everybody obeyed excepting
the captain's daughter, who stood unnoticed by one of the curtained
windows.
A profound silence followed, broken by a stifled sob from some
over-nervous woman. The low roll of an organ filled the void and died.
After that there was no complete sound but at intervals the silence took
breath, spoke in a half-articulate wail, and was dumb again.
Pale nebulous light shone in the cabinet and faded: then a single ray
fell direct on Laidley's face. It stood out from the night around like
a bas-relief--livid, commonplace, a presentment of every-day death. Each
man present suddenly saw his own grave open, and the world beyond
brought within reach through this insignificant man.
"The spirits of many of the dead are present," said the sepulchral voice
within the cabinet. "What do you ask of them?"
Laidley's lips moved: he grasped the arms of his chair, half rose: then
he fumbled mechanically in his pocket for his cigar-case, and not
finding it sank back helplessly.
"What do you ask of them? Their time is brief."
"I'm a very ill man," he piped feebly: "the doctors give me no hope at
all. I want advice about a certain matter before--before it's too late.
It is a great wrong I have done that I want to set right."
"Can any of the dead counsel you? Or do you summon one soul to appear?"
"There is but one who knows."
"Call for her, then."
Laidley looked about him uncertainly: then he said in a hoarse whisper,
"Virginie Morot!"
The captain sprang to his feet: "My wife? No, no! for God's sake!"
The light was swiftly drawn back into the cabinet and extinguished.
After several minutes the voice was heard again: "The spirit summoned is
present. But it has not the force to resume a material body unless the
need is urgent. You must state the question you would have answered."
"I must see Virginie here, in bodily presence, before I'll accept any
answer," said Laidley obstinately. "I'll have no hocus-pocus by mediums
or raps. If the dead know anything, she knows why I need her. I have had
money to which she had a--well, a claim. I've not spent it, perhaps, in
the best way. I have a mind now to atone for my mistake by leaving it to
a charity where I know it will do great good."
An amazed whistle broke through the darkness from the corner where the
judge sat. The captain caught Laidley's shoulder. "William," he
whispered, "surely you forget Jane."
Laidley shook him off. "The money is my own," he said loudly, "to do
with as I choose. But if Virginie can return from the dead, she shall
decide for me."
"It's enough to bring her back," muttered the judge. "Do you hear that?"
thumping Waring's knee--"that miserable shrimp swindling her child in
order to buy God's good-will for himself!"
There was a prolonged silence. At last a voice was heard: "She will
appear to you."
The organ rolled heavily, low soft thunders of music rose and fell, a
faint yellowish vapor stole out from under the cabinet and filled the
darkness with a visible haze. Captain Swendon stumbled to his feet and
went back to his daughter: "I can't bear it, child! I can't bear it!"
dropping into a chair.
She took his hand in her own, which were quite cool, and stroked and
kissed it. But she did not speak nor take her eyes from the door of the
cabinet.
It opened. Within sat Miriam, immovable, her eyes closed. Beside her
stood a shadowy luminous figure covered with a filmy veil. It moved
forward into the room. So thick was the vapor that the figure itself
appeared but a shade.
Laidley stooped forward, his hands on his knees, his lips apart, his
eyes dilated with terror.
The veil slowly fell from the face of the spirit, and revealed,
indistinctly as the negative of a photograph, a small thin woman with
eager, restless eyes, and black hair rolled in puffs high on the head in
the fashion of many years ago.
"Virginie!" gasped Laidley.
The captain shuddered, and hid his face. His daughter, with a quick step
backward, threw aside the curtains and flung open the shutters. The
broad daylight streamed in.
Combe sprang toward her with an oath.
The young girl held back the curtain steadily. "We need fresh air," she
said smiling resolutely in his face.
The rush of air, the daylight, the cheerful voice wakened the room as
out of a vision of death. The men started to their feet; there was a
tumult of voices and laughter; the materialized soul staggered back to
reach the cabinet. The whole of the cheap trickery was bared: her hair
was an ill-fitting wig, the chalk lay in patches on her face, the vapor
of Hades was only salt burning in a dish: the boards removed from the
window showed her snug hiding-place inside.
Dr. Dehr's fury made itself heard above the confusion: "You have brought
Spiritualism into disrepute by your infernal imposture!" clutching the
poor wretch by the shoulder, while another intemperate disciple called
loudly for the police. The woman began to sob, but did not utter a word.
"Let her go, doctor," said Mr. Waring, coming up. "We paid to see a
farce, and it was really a very nice bit of acting. This poor girl was
hired, no doubt: she is only earning her living."
"What has she done?" cried Dehr. "Spiritualism in Philadelphia never has
attracted the class of investigators that are here to-day, and she--"
shaking her viciously--"she's an impostor!"
"Damnation! she's a woman!" wrenching his hand from her. She gave Waring
a keen furtive glance, and drew quickly aside. While some of the seekers
after truth demanded their five dollars back with New England obstinacy,
and Combe chattered and screeched at them, she stood in the middle of
the room, immovable, her sombre sallow face set, her tawdry
stage-properties about her--the crown of false black hair, the sweeping
drapery, the smoking dish with fumes of ghastly vapor.
Mr. Waring went up to a short, broadly-built man in gray who had been
seated in the background during the seance. "I did not know that you
were in town or here, Mr. Neckart," he said with a certain marked
respect. "That is not an unpicturesque figure, I think. She would serve
as a study of Night, now--a stormy, muggy town-night, full of ooze and
slime." Mr. Waring's manner and rhetoric were uneasy and deferential.
Mr. Neckart was a power in a region quite outside of the little
fastidious gossiping club of men and women whom he was wont to call the
World.
"Your Night, apparently, has little relish for the morning," he said.
The woman's threatening eyes, in fact, were fixed on the tall fair girl,
the captain's daughter, who stood in the window, busied with buttoning
her father's overcoat and pinning his empty sleeve to his breast. She
was looking up at him, and talking: the wind stirred her loose pale-gold
hair; behind her branches of white roses from a vine outside thrust
themselves in at the window: the birds chirped in the rustling maples
beyond.
"What a wonderful effect of light and color!" said Waring, who had
lounged through studios and galleries enough to enable him to parcel out
the world into so many bits of palette and brush-work. "Observe the
atmosphere of sunshine and youth. Cabanel might paint the girl's face
for the Dawn. Eyes of that profound blue appear to hold the light
latent."
"There seems to be unusual candor in them," said Mr. Neckart, glancing
carelessly at Jane again, and drawing on his gloves. "A lack of
shrewdness remarkable in an American woman."
"The Swendons are Swedes by descent, you know. A little phlegm, a lack
of passion, is to be expected, eh? Now, my own taste prefers the
American type--features animated by a nimbler brain; as there, for
example," looking toward Miss Fleming. "Ugly beyond apology. But there
is a subtle attraction in it."
"No doubt you are right. I really know very little about women,"
indifferently. He nodded good-evening, glancing at his watch as he went
out.
The captain was conscious of some malignant influence at his back, and
turning, saw the woman, who had gradually approached, and now stood
still. He hastily stepped between her and his daughter: "Good God! Stand
back, Jane! This woman is following you."
"She looks as if she had the evil eye. But they are very fine eyes,"
said the young girl, inspecting her quietly, as if she had been a toad
that stood suddenly upright in her way.
"I owe you an ill turn, and I shall pay it," said the woman with a
tragic wave of the arms. "I had a way to support myself and my boy for
a year, and you have taken it from me."
"It was such a very poor way! Such a shabby farce! And it was my mother
that--" She stopped, a slight tremor on the fair, quiet face.
"Oh, I shall pay you!" The woman gathered her cheap finery about her and
swept from the room.
In the confusion Judge Rhodes had sought out Laidley, full of righteous
wrath on behalf of his friend the captain, against this limp fellow who
was going to enter heaven with a paltering apology for dishonesty on his
lips. Laidley, however, was reclining in the easy-chair with his eyes
closed, and the closed eyes gave so startling an appearance of death to
the face that the judge was thrown back in his headlong charge. "Why,
why, William! I'm sorry to see you looking so under the weather," he
said kindly.
Laidley's eyes began to blink: he smiled miserably: "It's too late to
throw the blame on the weather, judge. Though I'm going back to Aiken
next week. I came North too soon."
"This affair has turned out a more palpable humbug than I expected,"
trying to approach the point at issue by a gentle roundabout ascent. "I
wish Van Ness had been here--Pliny Van Ness. There's a man whose advice
I seek since I came to Philadelphia on all important matters. A man
whose integrity, justice--God bless me, William! You must know Pliny Van
Ness. Why don't you take his counsel, instead of meddling with these
wretched mediums? Raising the dead to tell you what to do? Bah! If you
had asked me, now--"
Laidley had drawn himself up in the chair, his watery eyes gathering a
faint eagerness: "Sit down. Here. I wish to speak to you, judge. Nobody
will hear us."
"Certainly. As you ask me now--I know the whole case. Don't try to talk:
it only makes you cough. You want to say that the property--"
"I want to say nothing about the property. My will was made last week. I
am determined to throw my means into that channel where it will best
contribute to God's service. He will not scorn a late repentance. But
Van Ness--it was about Van Ness I wanted to talk to you."
"If your will was made last week, why did you try to bring back poor
dead Virginie to advise you?"
"I don't know," said Laidley, coughing nervously--"I don't know. I
thought she would confirm me--I--I want to be just to her daughter, God
knows!"
"What is your idea of justice?"
"Why this--this," eagerly, catching the judge's red, fat hand in his
cold fingers. "Jane will be a woman whom Van Ness would be apt to
approve. I know he's fastidious. But she's very delicate and fair--as
fine a bit of human flesh as I ever saw. As for mind, she has none. A
mere child. He could mould her--mould her. Eh? I think I could throw out
an inducement which would lead him to look favorably on her--when she's
of a marriageable age, that is. If the girl were married to such a man
as Van Ness, surely she would be well placed for life. Nobody could
blame me for not making an heiress of her."
"Jane? Van Ness?" said the judge thoughtfully. "Well, Van Ness is a man
whom any woman in the country should be proud to marry. But he is
impregnable to that sort of thing. And Jane is but a child, as you say.
The scheme seems to me utterly unfeasible, Laidley. Besides, what has it
to do with her claims on you?"
"It has everything to do with them. I give her instead of money a home
and husband such as no money can buy. They must be brought together,
judge. You must do it. I have a word to say to Van Ness that will open
his eyes to her merits. I will plant the seed, as I might say. It will
grow fast enough."
The judge was silent as he helped Laidley, still talking eagerly, down
the stairs and into his carriage. The whole fantastic scheme was, as he
saw, the cowardly device of the dying man to appease his conscience.
That this poor creature should have any power to influence Van Ness, the
purest and strongest of men, was a mere bit of braggadocio, which surely
did not deceive even Laidley himself.
But what could he do? To stab with reproach, even to argue with this
nerveless, worn-out man, flaccid in mind and body, seemed to the kindly
old fellow as cruel as to torture a dying fish or other cold-blooded
creature of whose condition or capacity for suffering he could have no
just idea.
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
THE SWEETENER.
Spring blossom, rose of June and autumn-cluster
Appeal alike unto the bloom of health,
In whose spontaneous, overflowing lustre
Is half the secret of the season's wealth.
The pallid cheek may warm to apple-flushes,
The fevered lip kiss fondly sweets of June,
The languid palate leap to fruitage luscious,
Yet weary of their day before the noon.
'Tis laughing Health, with an unhindered fountain
Of joy upbubbling from her being's core,
Whose lavish life embraces vale or mountain,
And drains delight at every opened door.
MARY B. DODGE.
AN ENGLISH EASTER.
It may be said of the English as is said of the council of war in
Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the
rehearsal, that when they _do_ agree their unanimity is wonderful. They
differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of
Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the propriety of locking up the
Reverend Arthur Tooth for his Romanizing excesses, the histrionic merits
of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now
nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social
observances on which Respectability has set her seal. England is a
country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so
interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is
very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own
sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at
the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring
itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so
many people to be found doing the same thing in the same way at the same
time--using the same slang, wearing the same hats and cravats,
collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis
or of "polo," flocking into the same skating-rinks. The monotony of this
spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not
conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of
character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they
reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this
perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the
tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in
America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual
independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely
established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for
five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having
discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of
that explosive personal force in the English character which is
compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain
awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the
fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most
striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is
of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England
getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its
hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making
its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's,
propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the
State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches
no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it
explicitly haggles and grumbles,--in this great exhibition there is
something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows
whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the
whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that
whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these
manoeuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will
have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear
a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in
consolidating the German people and making them available for a
particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the
military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of
Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has
passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And
here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation.
When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his _entourage_ I did not
mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to
church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That
last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England
is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the
country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it
is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the
question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to
"position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such
a considerable affair.)
The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes
itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller
matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem
trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is
trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the
room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the
length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest
pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is
blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those
at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of
waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in
English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary.
But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into
each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it
for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of
depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is
observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being
several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London
atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your
guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish,"
it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness
and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form
part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society
possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the
sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual,
contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in
England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few
strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one)
which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has
struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the
historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent,
though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the
presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for
instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more
especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in
London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and
that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of
Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence.
It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this
vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were
apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of
them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been
spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to
collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the
threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false
start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for
the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of
it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city I remember how, when
I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the
street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked
Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's
customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Theatre
Francais, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have
suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this
year of the usual proportions: and you may be sure that people who did
not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places
in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light
up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-mosses to be
freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the
obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes
for quitting London there are few members of what the French call the
"easy class" who have not a collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts
to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without reason, though
at the moment I speak of their dullness must have been mitigated by the
unintermittent presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. Even
in mellow English country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and
atmospheric acridity--the moment at which the frank hostility of winter,
which has at last to give up the game, turns to peevishness and spite.
This is what makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy" people
to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing
is more striking to an American than the frequency of English holidays
and the large way in which occasions for change and diversion are made
use of. All this speaks to Americans of three things which they are
accustomed to see allotted in scantier measure. The English have more
time than we, they have more money, and they have a much higher relish
for holiday taking. (I am speaking of course always of the "easy
classes.") Leisure, fortune and the love of sport--these things are
implied in English society at every turn. It was a very small number of
weeks before Easter that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was
already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A
short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide Holidays, which I am
told are even more of a festival than Easter, and from this point to
midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The business
men and the professional men partake in equal measure of these agreeable
diversions, and I was amused at hearing a lady whose husband was an
active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving town with her
for ten days and though Easter was a very nice bit of idleness, they
really amused themselves with more gusto in the later recess, which
would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly probable, and
admired so picturesque a chiaroscuro of work and play. If my phrase has
a slightly ironical sound this is purely accidental. A large appetite
for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do
with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this
measure we Americans are rather ill-conditioned. Such holidays as we
take are taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes noticeable
that our privilege is rather heavy in our hands. Tribute rendered to
English industry, however (our own stands in no need of compliments), it
must be added that for those same easy classes I just spoke of things
are very easy indeed. The number of persons available for purely social
purposes at all times and seasons is infinitely greater than among
ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going
forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous leisure is as yet in
America an undeveloped branch of civilization. The young men who are
preparing for the stern realities of life among the gray-green cloisters
of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms but one half the year; and the
rosy little cricketers of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the
parental home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily the parental
home is apt to be an affair of gardens, lawns and parks.
Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is
really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is
suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge
dusky city seems to take on a still sadder coloring and a sort of hush
steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is
not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about
Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row--a
spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a
"bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas
Day and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I
betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for
I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would
not come round again for another year. This information was given me
apropos of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the
laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told
that all the washerwomen were drunk, and that, as it would take them
some time to revive, I must not look for a speedy resumption of these
relations. I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this
statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning
back. One of the incidental _agrements_ of life in the latter city had
been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman
with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her
head a frilled and fluted muslin cap which was an irresistible
advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_ was
_sober_ is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful
to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative
smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense
hair and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked
with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and
laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step
carried her off again, talking, to the door and with a brighter smile
and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think
how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be.
London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this
dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in
a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume
a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.
I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my
fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not
strictly accurate and that at the end of three months I had another
array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion however nothing
occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched,
though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the
lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were
very much _en evidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an
impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the
background and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets
were void of carriages and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the
"masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I
strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most
unfavorable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left
for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the
shifting gloom of the sky the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of
weather-proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway
stations overflowed and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses,"
I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed
through the glutinous medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few
things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it
suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially the
British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is
perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest.
London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of
graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those
I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points,
many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to
perceive their intrinsic hideousness. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday
uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having
no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick
house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight
stiff window-slits and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little
black line resembling a slice of curb-stone. There is not an accessory,
not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to
beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an
Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker street--a
delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the
British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and
it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that
larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not
made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier
kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is
picturesque in spite of details--from its dark-green, misty parks, the
way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloudy skies,
and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an
atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play
of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial
gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to the picturesque this is a
constant entertainment, and yet this is only part of it. What completes
the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many
ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point
London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its
hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being
parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere, else is so much human life gathered
together and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions.
These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of
every possible kind, and this is the interest of London. Those that were
most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more
perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a
brighter strain.
I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from
Piccadilly across the Green Park and through St. James's Park. The parks
were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling about
the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the
dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people
about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in
reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I
may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and
promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the
Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated
myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels
in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent
disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly
speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are
too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the
theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find
that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. You are a
tight fit in your place wherever you find it; you have too many
companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of
thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were,
swallows up quality, and such perpetual familiarity contains the germs
of contempt. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England
is to own a "park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the
middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the
crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a
comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back
through the parks in the midst of these "circumstances," and I found
that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English
assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people
in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that
the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without this
impression being confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes
felt it to be woefully shaken in the presence of a small number. I
suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of
handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper
class I imagine this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the
whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by
their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as
ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have
that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms
of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery--an ugly and
hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable
in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if
their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what
is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that
two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree
or other the traces of liquor, which is not a beautifying fluid. The
proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very
striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact
that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A
very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the
distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes
from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted,
misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in
every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest
an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the
observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-modeled
faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and
handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised
heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.
All this, I admit, is a description of the men rather than of the women;
but to a certain extent it includes the women. There is much more beauty
among English women of the lower class than strangers who are accustomed
to dwell upon their "coarseness" recognize. Pretty heads, pretty mouths
and cheeks and chins, pretty eyes too, if you are content with a
moderate brilliancy, and at all events charming complexions--these seem
to me to be presented in a very sufficient abundance. The capacity of an
Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as unlimited, and even if (I
repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised,
yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points.
Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous--especially among the
younger ones. Now the same distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are
certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman
with another, they are physically very well appointed. Their features
are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many
of their nearer and remoter neighbors, and their figures are apt to be
both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer
accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and
ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always
from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London
and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who
adorn the West-End pavements, and who advance before you in couples,
arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial,
are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have it
at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they
are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples
are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those
magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older
civilizations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and
meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America
there are few grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them
are almost handsome!
The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most
striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since
I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr.
George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter
period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical
agitator, of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse
desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful
profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens
but to golden keys. But he was a useful and honorable man, and his own
people gave him an honorable burial. I emerged accidentally into
Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one
I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed
to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up
beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play.
Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy;
but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be
magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand
by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had
the character of a great popular "manifestation." The hearse was
followed by very few carriages, but the cortege of pedestrians stretched
away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly,
on a scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was
broken by a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant
Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the
rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of
the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and
women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had
scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and
were making a sort of solemn spree of it. Very solemn it all
was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an
interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom
I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the
wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures
which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of
strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly
sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found in
the whole affair something memorable. My impression rose not simply from
the radical, or as I may say for the sake of color, the revolutionary,
emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but
from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day
the queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking
straight down into Westminster and over the royal cortege, were gathered
a group of banners and festoons, inscribed in big staring letters with
mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police-department might easily
have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne
claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded, and
whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several sweeping reflections
on the social arrangements of the time and country. These portentous
standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if they had been
the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I
had lately come from Paris, where the police-department _is_ sensitive,
and where revolutionary placards are not observed to adorn the base of
the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. I was, therefore, the more
struck on both of the occasions I speak of with the admirable English
practice of letting people alone--with the good sense and the good humor
and even the good promise of it. It was this that I found impressive as
I watched the "manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans--the
fact that the mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the
excellent quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was
kept clear and comfortable.
When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's
friends--three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was
hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was
not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the
rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one
plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of
enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the
unanimity I began by talking about), and to keep down as much as
possible the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the
best, so much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring
within the limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might
have projected in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due
cogitation I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking
Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous journey that I
proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an account. But I have
dallied so much by the way that I have come almost to my rope's end
without reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artistically, by
relating that I put myself in the humor for remote adventure by going
down the Thames on a penny steamboat to--the Tower! This was on the
Saturday before Easter and the City was as silent as the grave. The
Tower was a memory of my childhood, and having a theory, that from such
memories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had not
retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the Tower is very
good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed it would seem to my maturer
vision; very vast and grand, historical and romantic. I could not get
into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved
from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the
train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the
courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of
the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I
stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the
railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway.
There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and
one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of
his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish
country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens;
he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the _genius loci_. I found
this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a
little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of
Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the
illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town.
"Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak
to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of
foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black
velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my
'usband, 'I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black
velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way
particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of
foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street,
stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring
Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial
aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or
casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the
dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into
its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of
laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here
established a charity which should furnish "six poor travelers, not
rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment gratis and
four pence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in memory
of his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at
Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to knock at the door of
Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor.
The poor traveler who avails himself of the testamentary four pence may
easily resume his journey as far as Chatham without breaking his
treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept
under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover, to join his aunt,
Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which forms an
interminable crooked thoroughfare, crowded, in the dusk, as I measured
it up and down, with specimens of the British soldier from the large
garrison at Chatham; those trim and firmly-pacing red-coats who seem, to
eyes accustomed to the promiscuous continental levies, so picked and
disciplined, polished and pomatumed, such ornamental and yet after all,
such capable warriors.
The cathedral at Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an
awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and
effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But
within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the
vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and
breaks that long vista so properly of the very essence of a great
church. Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of steps to pass
through the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly, by the
way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in
a relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess this inferior
edifice in America, we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands
in the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember,
however, an old priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the
main street; I remember something in the way of a quiet, weird deanery
or canonry, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower
that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come
circling and clamoring around it. Better than these things, however, I
remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a most noble and imposing
ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public
garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the
place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is
agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the
destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I
sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what
was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great
many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction
or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached
expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of
softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye.
English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade.
Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the
twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a
mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive
than this towering square of Rochester.
It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral
stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and
is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house,
you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and
magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more
beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath
the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last
chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I
can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general
impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of
Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more
perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman
arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view
superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine
modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches
had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other
its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the
roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest
portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so
crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the
rest of the structure it has a magnificent color--a sort of rich dull
yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly
appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church--the
side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of;
the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown
archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing
something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow
intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a
King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and
picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept
up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very
picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome,
and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones,
themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister
opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none
the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful
wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and
impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or
supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but
it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and
as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps,
runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the
faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble
ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea."
From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger
to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with
tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if
it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height
which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering
down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of
course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place
is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down
at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit
of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late
in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a
service in the choir, but it was well over and I had the place to
myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to,
turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the
side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I
had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I
shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was
stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood;
his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon
a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image
of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet
was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the
beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I
too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in
the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life
burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a
singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty
chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his
presence it was possible to feel a certain personal nearness to him.
One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British
valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for
many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the
richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it
has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the
limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was
originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for
fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as
the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady
Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the
pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of
course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made
my way down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of low, dark
arches and pillars, and groped about till I found the place where the
frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville
and Fitzurse out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood
there a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral; great rumbling
gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through the open sides of the crypt,
and, mingling with the darkness which seemed to deepen and flash in
corners, and with the potent mouldy smell, made me feel as if I had
descended into the very bowels of history. I emerged again, but the
rain had settled down and spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to my
inn and sat in a chair by the coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's
agreeable "Memorials" of Canterbury, and wondering over the musty
appointments and meagre resources of English hostels. This establishment
had entitled itself (in compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose), the
"Fleur-de-Lis." The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to
let it take me to the inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered. I found
compensation at Dover, however, where the "Lord Warden" Hotel struck me
as the best inn I had encountered in England. My principal errand at
Dover was to look for Miss Betsey Trotwood's cottage, but I am sorry to
say I failed to discover it. Was it not upon the downs, overlooking the
town and the sea? I saw nothing on the downs but Dover Castle, which, in
default of Miss Trotwood's stronghold, I zealously visited. It is an
establishment of quite the same character, bristling with offensive and
defensive machinery. More seriously speaking, it is a magnificent
fortress--a bequest of the Middle Ages turned to excellent account by
modern engineers. The day was clear and beautiful, and I walked about
for a while among the towers and the grassy bastions; then I stood and
gossiped with an amiable gunner who talked to me of Malta, leaning
against the rampart and looking across the wrinkled sea to the
glimmering cliffs of France.
HENRY JAMES, JR.
THE ELIXIR.
"Oh brew me a potion strong and good!
One golden drop in his wine
Shall charm his sense and fire his blood,
And bend his will to mine."
Poor child of passion! ask of me
Elixir of death or sleep,
Or Lethe's stream; but love is free,
And woman must wait and weep.
EMMA LAZARUS.
LEONIE REGNAULT: A STUDY FROM FRENCH LIFE.
In the pretty town of Macon, on the banks of the Saone, lived Leonie
Regnault. She remembered no other home than the gray stone house with
its balconied windows that overlooked the beautiful river and the long,
somewhat formal promenades that stretch along its banks, with their
green trees and many seats, but never a blade of grass--all dry,
hard-beaten gravel, after the ugly French fashion, convenient enough, it
must be confessed, for the evening loungers, gay or tired, whom the dewy
green of Nature might incommode.
Leonie's father lived in Paris, and he had brought her when only three
years old to the gray stone house and the care of his only sister,
Madame Perrin, a childless widow, who gladly received the beautiful
little girl to the large shelter of a loving heart. But Leonie never
forgot her father. The little creature would sit on her low-cushioned
chair and sing to herself, "Mon beau papa! mon beau papa! O comme je
t'aime, mon beau papa!" I suppose every tender father appears beautiful
to his little child, but Colonel Regnault was indeed a strikingly
handsome man, with a perfect grace and dignity of manner which rendered
him indispensable to the court of Louis Napoleon, where he had a
prominent position on all days of ceremony. Once or twice a year he made
his escape from court duties for a brief visit to Leonie, whose love for
him grew more intense with years, concentrating in itself all the
romance of her enthusiastic nature.
Madame Perrin saw few visitors, and scarcely ever went out except to
mass. Every morning her good Louise took Leonie to the girls' school in
the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and
went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Leonie had her
inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so
devoted to each other as were Leonie Regnault and Helene Dupres. They
sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other
long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life
seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new--the merest nothing has
its poem and history. They had made their first communion together,
which was the most important incident hitherto in Leonie's uneventful
life. Her father had come down on this occasion, and when she came from
the altar he had put aside her white veil and kissed her with tears in
his eyes.
Leonie had completed her fifteenth year when she was thrown into great
excitement by an unexpected piece of news. Her father was about to
marry. The future Madame Regnault was a young widow of good family and
large fortune. He had taken this step, he said, for Leonie's sake even
more than for his own. He wished to have his daughter with him and to
cultivate her talents; and how could this be done without a home in
Paris? The marriage would take place early in September, and the first
week in October he would come for Leonie. He looked forward with delight
to having a home for his beautiful beloved child.
It was the last week in September. The rain was falling in a dull dreary
way, as it had been falling all day and almost a week of days.
"I wish it would clear up," said Leonie. "I hate to have everything look
so dreary just the last week I have to stay."
"Do you ever think, cherie, how dull it will be for me when you are
gone? What shall I do without ma chere petite?" asked Madame Perrin
tenderly.
"And what shall I do without you, chere maman? I am afraid I shall not
like the new mamma that papa has given me. Or perhaps I am only afraid
that she will not like me. You are my real mother," taking her hand
caressingly. "I wish I could remember my own mother. Why have you never
told me anything about her? I have asked you so many times."
"I never was acquainted with your mother. She lived in Paris, you know,
and I lived here."
"But you have seen her. Was she beautiful? Am I like her?"
"Yes," said Madame Perrin with a little start--"so much like her that it
frightens me." Then more deliberately, in reply to Leonie's astonished
eyes, "I mean that it is sad to be reminded of one who is dead."
"Papa must have loved her very much. I remember when I was a little
girl, and began to wonder why I had not a mother like Helene, you said I
must never ask papa about her, it would give him so much pain. But now I
may, now that he has given her place to somebody else."
"By no means, Leonie--less than ever. If your poor father has at last
succeeded in leaving his sorrow behind him, do you wish to drag him back
to it, you thoughtless child?"
"Then you must tell me yourself, ma tante. It is very strange that you
are so unwilling to tell me anything about my pretty mother who died
when I was almost a baby."
"Why will you be so persistent? I do not like to give you so much pain."
"Why, dear aunt, I shall like to hear about her. It is very sad not to
have any mother, but I can't feel as distressed about it as if I had
known and loved her. She is only a beautiful dream to me. I cannot feel
as I should if you were to die and leave me. You must tell me. I shall
not let you have any peace till you do. You can't refuse me now, just
when I am going away."
"Well, if I must, I must," said Madame Perrin with trembling voice.
"What do I know? It may be for your salvation. The Blessed Virgin grant
it! Your mother, Leonie, was a great beauty."
"I was sure of it. If I could only have seen her with my dear papa! He
is so handsome always."
"She was a great singer too."
"I am glad of it. I shall be a singer when I have learned in Paris. I
care more for the lessons in singing than for anything else in the great
beautiful city, except being with my own papa."
"But, Leonie, your mother sang in the Grand Opera. She was the best
singer in France, or in the world perhaps, and everybody was crazy about
her."
"And so papa married an opera-singer? It is quite a romance."
"He did not marry her."
"Not marry her?" said Leonie with white face and great black, wide-open
eyes.
"She was married already to one of the singers in the opera, and she
left him to live with your father."
Leonie's white lips shaped rather than uttered the question, "What did
he do, the husband?"
"He challenged your father, and, though he was so much his inferior,
Leon was too generous to hurt his feelings by refusing to fight with him
after doing him such an injury. He was so good a swordsman that he
easily disarmed him with only a slight wound."
"This is terrible!" said Leonie. "My father such a wicked man!"
"That is not the way the world looked at it. All the men envied Leon,
and the women flattered and spoiled him more than ever."