XXI.
MAY 30.
ERNEST asked me to go with him to see one of his patients, as he
often does when there is a lull in the tempest at home. We both feel
that as we have so little money of our own to give away, it is a
privilege to give what services and what cheering words we can. As I
took it for granted that we were going to see some poor old woman, I
put up several little packages of tea and sugar, with which Susan
Green always keeps me supplied, and added a bottle of my own
raspberry vinegar, which never comes amiss, I find, to old people.
Ernest drove to the door of an aristocratic-looking house, and helped
me to alight in his usual silence.
"It is probably one of the servants we are going to visit," I
thought, within myself; "but I am surprised at his bringing me. The
family may not approve it."
The next thing I knew I found myself being introduced to a beautiful,
brilliant young lady, who sat in a wheel-chair like a queen on a
throne in a room full of tasteful ornaments, flowers and birds. Now,
I had come away just as I was, when Ernest called me, and that "was"
means a very plain gingham dress wherein I had been darning stockings
all the morning. I suppose a saint wouldn't have cared for that, but
I did, and for a moment stood the picture of confusion, my hands full
of oddly shaped parcels and my face all in a flame.
"My wife, Miss Clifford," I heard Ernest say, and then I caught the
curious, puzzled look in her eyes, which said as plainly as words
could do:
"What has the creature brought me?"
"I ask your pardon, Miss Clifford," I said, thinking it best to speak
out just the honest truth, "but I supposed the doctor was taking me
to see some of his old women, and so I have brought you a little tea,
and a little sugar, and a bottle of raspberry vinegar!"
"How delicious!" cried she. "It really rests me to meet with a
genuine human being at last! Why didn't you make some stiff, prim
speech, instead of telling the truth out and out? I declare I mean to
keep all you have brought me, just for the fun of the thing."
This put me at ease, and I forgot all about my dress in a moment.
"I see you are just what the doctor boasted you were," she went on.
"But he never would bring you to see me before. I suppose he has told
you why I could not go to see you?"
"To tell the truth, he never speaks to me of his patients unless he
thinks I can be of use to them."
"I dare say I do not look much like an invalid," said she; "but here
I am, tied to this chair. It is six months since I could bear my own
weight upon my feet."
I saw then that though her face was so bright and full of color, her
hand was thin and transparent. But what a picture she made as she sat
there in magnificent beauty, relieved by such a back-ground of
foliage, flowers, and artistic objects!
"I told the doctor the other day that life was nothing but a humbug,
and he said he should bring me a remedy against that false notion the
next time he came, and you, I suppose, are that remedy," she
continued. "Come, begin; I am ready to take any number of doses."
I could only laugh and try to look daggers at Ernest, who sat looking
over a magazine, apparently absorbed in its contents.
"Ah!" she cried, nodding her head sagaciously, "I knew you would
agree with me."
"Agree with you in calling life a humbug!" I cried, now fairly
aroused. "Death itself is not more a reality!"
"I have not tried death yet," she said, more seriously; "but I have
tried life twenty-five years and I know all about it. It is eat,
drink, sleep yawn and be bored. It is what shall I wear, where shall
I go, how shall I get rid of the time; it says, 'How do you do? how
is your husband? How are your children? '-it means, 'Now I have asked
all the conventional questions, and I don't care a fig what their
answer may be.'"
"This may be its meaning to some persons," I replied, "for instance,
to mere pleasure-seekers. But of course it is interpreted quite
differently by others. To some it means nothing but a dull, hopeless
struggle with poverty and hardship--and its whole aspect might be
changed to them, should those who do not know what to do to get rid
of the time, spend their surplus leisure in making this struggle less
brutalizing."
"Yes, I have heard such doctrine, and at one time I tried charity
myself. I picked up a dozen or so of dirty little wretches out of the
streets, and undertook to clothe and teach them. I might as well have
tried to instruct the chairs in my room. Besides the whole house had
to be aired after they had gone, and mamma missed two teaspoons and a
fork and was perfectly disgusted with the whole thing. Then I fell to
knitting socks for babies, but they only occupied my hands, and my
head felt as empty as ever. Mamma took me off on a journey, as she
always did when I took to moping, and that diverted me for a while.
But after that everything went on in the old way. I got rid of part
of the day by changing my dress, and putting on my pretty things-it
is a great thing to have a habit of wearing one's ornaments, for
instance; and then in the evening one could go to the opera or the
theater, or some other place of amusement, after which one could
sleep all through the next morning, and so get rid of that. But I had
been used to such things all my life, and they had got to be about as
flat as flat can be. If I had been born a little earlier in the
history of the world, I would have gone into a convent; but that sort
of thing is out of fashion now."
"The best convent," I said, "for a woman is the seclusion of her own
home. There she may find vocation and fight her battles, and there
she may learn the reality and the earnestness of life."
"Pshaw!" cried she. "Excuse me, however, saying that; but some of
the most brilliant girls I know have settled down into mere married
women and spend their whole time in nursing babies! Think how
belittling!"
"Is it more so than spending it in dressing, driving, dancing, and
the like?"
"Of course it is. I had a friend once who shone like a star in
society. She married, and children as fast as she could. Well! what
consequence? She lost her beauty, lost her spirit and animation, lost
her youth, and lost her health. The only earthly things she can talk
about are teething, dieting, and the measles!"
I laughed at this exaggeration, and looked round to see what Ernest
thought of such talk. But he had disappeared.
"As you have spoken plainly to me, knowing, me, to be a wife and a
mother, you must allow me to 'speak plainly in return," I began.
"Oh, speak plainly, by all means! I am quite sick and tired of having
truth served up in pink cotton, and scented with lavender."
"Then you will permit me to say that when you speak contemptuously of
the vocation of maternity, you dishonor, not only the mother who bore
you, but the Lord Jesus Himself, who chose to be born of woman, and
to be ministered unto by her through a helpless infancy."
Miss Clifford was a little startled.
"How terribly in earnest you are!" she said. "It is plain that to you,
at any rate, life is indeed no humbug."
I thought of my dear ones, of Ernest, of my children, of mother, and
of James, and I thought of my love to them and of theirs to me. And I
thought of Him who alone gives reality to even such joys as these. My
face must have been illuminated by the thought, for she dropped the
bantering tone she had used hitherto, and asked, with real
earnestness:
"What is it you know, and that I do not know, that makes you so
satisfied, while I am so dissatisfied?"
I hesitated before I answered, feeling as I never felt before how
ignorant, how unfit to lead others, I really am. Then I said:
"Perhaps you need to know God, to know Christ?"
She looked disappointed and tired. So I came away, first promising,
at her request, to go to see her again. I found Ernest just driving
up, and told him what had passed. He listened in his usual silence,
and I longed to have him say whether I had spoken wisely and well.
JUNE 1.-I have been to see Miss Clifford again and made mother go
with me. Miss Clifford took a fancy to her at once.
"Ah!" she said, after one glance at the dear, loving face, "nobody
need tell me that you are good and kind. But I am a little afraid of
good people. I fancy they are always criticising me and expecting me
to imitate their perfection."
"Perfection does not exact perfection," was mother's answer. "I would
rather be judged by an angel than by a man." And then mother led her
on, little by little, and most adroitly, to talk of herself and of
her state of health. She is an orphan and lives in this great,
stately house alone with her servants. Until she was laid aside by
the state pf her health, she lived in the world and of it. Now she is
a prisoner, and prisoners have time to think.
"Here I sit," she said, "all day long. I never was fond of staying
at home, or of reading, and needlework I absolutely hate. In fact, I
do not know how to sew."
"Some such pretty, feminine work might beguile you of a few of the
long hours of these long days," said mother. "One can't be always
reading."
"But a lady came to see me, a Mrs. Goodhue, one of your good sort, I
suppose, and she preached me quite a sermon on the employment of
time. She said I had a solemn admonition of Providence, and ought to
devote myself entirely to religion. I had just begun to be interested
in a bit of embroidery, but she frightened me out of it. But I can't
bear such dreadfully good people, with faces a mile long."
Mother made her produce the collar, or whatever it was, showed her
how to hold her needle and arrange her pattern, and they both got so
absorbed in it that I had leisure to look at some of the beautiful
things with which the room was full.
"Make the object of your life right," I heard mother say, at last,
"and these little details will take care of themselves."
"But I haven't any object," Miss Clifford objected, "unless it is to
get through these tedious days somehow. Before I was taken ill my
chief object was to make myself attractive to the people I met. And
the easiest way to do that was to dress becomingly and make myself
look as well as I could."
"I suppose," said mother, "that most girls could say the same. They
have an instinctive desire to please, and they take what they
conceive to be the shortest and easiest road to that end. It requires
no talent, no education, no thought to dress tastefully; the most
empty-hearted frivolous young person can do it, provided she has
money enough. Those who can't get the money make up for it by fearful
expenditure of precious time. They plan, they cut, they fit, they
rip, they trim till they can appear in society looking exactly like
everybody else. They think of nothing, talk of nothing but how this
shall be fashioned and that be trimmed; and as to their hair, Satan
uses it as his favorite net, and catches them in it every day of
their lives."
"But I never cut or trimmed," said Miss Clifford.
"No, because you could afford to have it done for you. But you
acknowledge that you spent a great deal of time in dressing because
you thought that the easiest way of making yourself attractive. But
it does not follow that the easiest way is the best way, and
sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home."
"For instance?"
"Well, let us imagine a young lady, living in the world as you say
you lived. She has never seriously reflected on any subject one half
hour in her life. She has been borne on by the current and let it
take her where it would. But at last some influence is brought to
bear upon her which leads her to stop to look about her and to think.
She finds herself in a world of serious, momentous events. She see
she cannot live in it, was not meant to live in it forever, and that
her whole unknown future depends on what she is, not on how she
looks. She begins to cast about for some plan of life, and this
leads---"
"A plan of life?" Miss Clifford interrupted. "I never heard of such a
thing."
"Yet you would smile at an architect, who having a noble structure to
build, should begin to work on it in a haphazard way, putting in a
brick here and a stone there, weaving in straws and sticks if they
come to hand, and when asked on what work he was engaged, and what
manner of building he intended to erect, should reply he had no plan,
but thought something would come of it."
Miss Clifford made no reply. She sat with her head resting on her
band, looking dreamily before her, a truly beautiful, but unconscious
picture. I too, began to reflect, that while I had really aimed to
make the most out of life, I had not done it methodically or
intelligently.
We are going to try to stay in town this summer. Hitherto Ernest
would not listen to my suggestion of what an economy this would be.
He always said this would turn out anything but an economy in the
end. But now we have no teething baby; little Raymond is a strong,
healthy child, and Una remarkably well for her, and money is so slow
to come in and so fast to go out. What discomforts we suffer in the
country it would take a book to write down, and here we shall have
our own home, as usual. I shall not have to be separated from Ernest,
and shall have leisure to devote to two very interesting people who
must stay in town all the year round, no matter who goes out of it. I
mean dear Mrs. Campbell and Miss Clifford, who both attract me,
though in such different ways.