“Joy, joy to earth! Behold the hallowed morn! In David’s city Christ the Lord is born! ‘Glory to God!’ let angels shout on high, ‘Good-will to men!’ the listening Earth reply!”
They spoke with hurried words and accents wild; Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child. No trembling word the mother’s joy revealed, One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed; Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart, But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall, Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all. The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill, The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun, Spoke in soft words of Joseph’s quiet son. No voice had reached the Galilean vale
Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds’ tale; In the meek, studious child they only saw The future Rabbi, learned in Israel’s law.
So grew the boy; and now the feast was near, When at the holy place the tribes appear. Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen Beyond the hills that girt the village-green, Save when at midnight, o’er the star-lit sands, Snatched from the steel of Herod’s murdering bands, A babe, close-folded to his mother’s breast, Through Edom’s wilds he sought the sheltering West.
Then Joseph spake: “Thy boy hath largely grown; Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown; Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest Goes he not with us to the holy feast?”
And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white; Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light. The thread was twined; its parting meshes through From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew, Till the full web was wound upon the beam, Love’s curious toil,–a vest without a seam!
They reach the holy place, fulfil the days To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise. At last they turn, and far Moriah’s height Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight. All day the dusky caravan has flowed
In devious trails along the winding road, (For many a step their homeward path attends, And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.) Evening has come,–the hour of rest and joy; Hush! hush!–that whisper,-“Where is Mary’s boy?”
O weary hour! O aching days that passed Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last: The soldier’s lance,–the fierce centurion’s sword, The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord, The midnight crypt that suck’s the captive’s breath, The blistering sun on Hinnom’s vale of death!
Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column’s shining plinth, Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more The Temple’s porches, searched in vain before; They found him seated with the ancient men, The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen, Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near; Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear, Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
And Mary said,–as one who, tried too long, Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong, “What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done? Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!” Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone, Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown; Then turned with them and left the holy hill, To all their mild commands obedient still.
The tale was told to Nazareth’s sober men, And Nazareth’s matrons told it oft again; The maids retold it at the fountain’s side; The youthful shepherds doubted or denied; It passed around among the listening friends, With all that fancy adds and fiction fends, Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown Of Joseph’s son, who talked the Rabbis down.
But Mary, faithful to its lightest word, Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard, Till the dread morning rent the Temple’s veil, And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.
VI
You don’t look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back. Bloated some, I expect.
This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express- train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,—-Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, “You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven”; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,–in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.
And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,– sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.
They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On the contrary, the Poor Relation’s remark turned him pale, as I have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little bark grows sharp and savage, and–confound the thing!–you find it is a wolf’s whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast where he has been nestling so long.–The Poor Relation said that somebody’s surrup was good for folks that were gettin’ into a bad way.–The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry- pictorial.
Whiskey’s the fellah,–said the young man John.–Make it into punch, cold at dinner-time ‘n’ hot at bed-time. I’ll come up ‘n’ show you how to mix it. Have n’t any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin’ down in Hanover Street?
Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where the fat man was exhibitin’. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more’n ten year old.
It is n’t two years,–said the young man John, since that fat fellah was exhibitin’ here as the Livin’ Skeleton. Whiskey–that’s what did it,–real Burbon’s the stuff. Hot water, sugar, ‘n’ jest a little shavin’ of lemon-skin in it,–skin, mind you, none o’ your juice; take it off thin,–shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on the sides of their foreheads.
But I am a teetotaller,–said the divinity-student in a subdued tone;–not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young fellow had just drawn.
He took up his hat and went out.
I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,–I said. –I don’t believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks as if his mind were made up to something.
I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along, looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was there and overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of well-bred and ill-bred people.
I began,–The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone, expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.
–I thought you were a great champion of equality,–said the discreet and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor’s daughter.
I go politically for equality,–I said,–and socially for the quality.
Who are the “quality,”–said the Model, etc., in a community like ours?
I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,–I said. –Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex- presidents are nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own true laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.
Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality, there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of social position,–as you see by the circumstances that the core of all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to all else.
Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place everywhere,–in the great centres of our republic as much as in old European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely hereditary,–here it is more completely elective.
–Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who are the electors?–said the Model.
Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote. The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is presentable, and what can’t stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,–quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held “base” fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
Does not money go everywhere?–said the Model.
Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we feel, if we cannot explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by thinking a little.
All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences. In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones. They have n’t read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don’t know where you will find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of Sisera. The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest fashion is intensely alive,–not alive necessarily to the truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,–it is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken. Don’t you see why? Attention and deference don’t require you to make fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.
–A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,–said the Model.
[My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n’t get married. Served you right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,–if you mean by flattery telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,–an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than otherwise, isn’t worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she may do well enough to hold discussions with.
–I don’t think the Model exactly liked this. She said,–a little spitefully, I thought,–that a sensible man might stand a little praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the habit of getting much.
Oh, yes,–I replied,–just as men get sick of tobacco. It is notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
–That ‘s so!–said the young fellow John,–I’ve got tired of my cigars and burnt ’em all up.
I am heartily glad to hear it,–said the Model,–I wish they were all disposed of in the same way.
So do I,–said the young fellow John.
Can’t you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your own?
I wish I could,–said the young fellow John.
It would be a noble sacrifice,–said the Model, and every American woman would be grateful to you. Let us burn them all in a heap out in the yard.
That a’n’t my way,–said the young fellow John;–I burn ’em one ‘t’ time,–little end in my mouth and big end outside.
–I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when it should reach the calm stillness of the Model’s interior apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he has dropped into a well. But before it had fairly reached the water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh, that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it. It was plain that some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it. So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model–who, if she had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life– had not the tact to join. She seemed to be “stuffy” about it, as the young fellow John said. In fact, I was afraid the joke would have cost us both our new lady-boarders. It had no effect, however, except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two, who could, on the whole, be spared.
–I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few axioms on the matter of breeding. But it so happened, that, exactly at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of manners. Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He told us it was childish to lay down rules for deportment,–but he could not help laying down a few.
Thus,–Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry. True, but hard of application. People with short legs step quickly, because legs are pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are. Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization: quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought, excitable temper. Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good-breeding. Vulgar persons can’t sit still, or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
Talking of one’s own ails and grievances.–Bad enough, but not so bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill- looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
Apologizing.–A very desperate habit,–one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk about them.
Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and eyes that do not wander,–shyness of personalities, except in certain intimate communions,–to be light in hand in conversation, to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,–to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,–to have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies, throughout your person and–dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men who have shown as much self- devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing- room. I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess. He wore no shirt-collar,–he had on black gloves,–and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the social mendicant,–the white billows of her beauty heaving under the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,–I should have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may happen,–how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,–an unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern! No,–there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers. I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,– or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that haow means what; that think-in’ is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,–what they say when they think they say first, (fe-eest,–fe as in the French le),–or that cheer means chair,–or that urritation means irritation,–and so of other enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know, comes round to the Indian standard,–to take everything coolly,–nil admirari,–if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the same thing.
If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the divinity-student,–go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of the wretches. Don’t for mercy’s sake think I hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty “saving your presence,” when she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,–thinned by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of human vegetable.
I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular record, which some young people who are going to choose professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance. A physician is not–at least, ought not to be–an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another. “You have killed me,” said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was incurable. He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in six’ weeks. If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone, persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to let fall.
Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be right.
This repetition of the above words,–gentleman and lady,–which could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of them by those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
I don’t doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these monstrous words–monstrous in such a connection–had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,–had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,–so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,–the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism. Any persons whom it could please could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below a certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
–I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a good person. Therefore we like her.–Only we don’t.
This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model. “Pious and painefull.” Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word “painefull” came, before people thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
–So, the old fellah’s off to-morrah,–said the young man John.
Old fellow?–said I,–whom do you mean?
Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in petticoats.
–Now that means something,–said I to myself.–These rough young rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with their eyes shut. A real woman does a great many things without knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects with everything they do, just like men. They can’t help it, no doubt; but we can’t help getting sick of them, either. Intellect is to a woman’s nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the outside.—You don’t know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion? Because of the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as woman. The current should run the other-way. The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always travel to the lips via the heart. It does so in those women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong way in the Model. That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said “I hate her, I hate her.” That is the reason why the young man John called her the “old fellah,” and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable. That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces with scalpel and forceps. That is the reason why the young girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.
Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high culture. It is not
“The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr with Aurora playing,”
when the two meet
“—on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,”
that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.–Don’t throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of our latitudes,–the daughters of the soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,–they have a glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe; and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and heaven in their souls. Our ice-eyed brain-women are really admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more. Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological cabinets.
Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now. A little clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way. Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic understanding. Goodbye! Where is my Beranger? I must read a verse or two of “Fretillon.”
Fair play for all. But don’t claim incompatible qualities for anybody. Justice is a very rare virtue in our community. Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin’s digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly. What are all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.
Justice! A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human dispositions. Why doesn’t a man always strike out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of injustice?
So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer. They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world of thought through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.
Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the laws of good-breeding,–but still it loves abundant life, opulent and showy organizations,–the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of female architecture,–plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,–women whom dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,– talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,–and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.
But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about. Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
Wealth, too,–what an endless repetition of the same foolish trivialities about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain tenure and transitory character. In old times, when men were all the time fighting and robbing each other,–in those tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a man’s cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way. But, with common prudence in investments, it is not so now. In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money. A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.
I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades the other.
A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not generally to be taken “neat,” but watered with the ideas of common-sense and commonplace people. So, if any of my young friends should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and “all- rounds,” or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give them references to some of the class referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to flatter them. I hope not;–if I do, set it down as a weakness. But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them. Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the following lesson for the day.
THE TWO STREAMS.
Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall, In rushing river-tides!
Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble’s edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid Of foam-flecked Oregon.
So from the heights of Will
Life’s parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill, Each widening torrent bends,
From the same cradle’s side,
From the same mother’s knee,–
One to long darkness and the frozen tide, One to the Peaceful Sea!
VII
Our landlady’s daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to gentility. She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is known by all to be a mark of high breeding. She wears her trains very long, as the great ladies do in Europe. To be sure, their dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must ride in coaches when they are in full dress. It is true, that, considering various habits of the American people, also the little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one would care to be her neighbor. But then there is no need of being so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our little deformed gentleman was the other day.
–There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,–he said. Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir! They had grand women in old Rome, Sir,–and the women bore such men–children as never the world saw before. And so it was here, Sir. I tell you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman’s milk before it ran in man’s blood, Sir!
But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our streets!–where do they come from? Not out of Boston parlors, I trust. Why, there is n’t a beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying about with her pah!–that’s what I call getting vulgarity into your bones and marrow. Making believe be what you are not is the essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people. If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach. I wouldn’t let one of ’em into my room without serving ’em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,–cut off his skirts, Sir! cut off his skirts!
I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in the way he condemned.
Stylish women, I don’t doubt,–said the Little Gentleman.–Don’t tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show. I won’t believe it of a lady. There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things. If a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend, but doesn’t know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;–there may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house for her to deal with. I don’t like the Bloomers any too well,–in fact, I never saw but one, and she–or he, or it–had a mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been a—–
The Little Gentleman stopped short,–flushed somewhat, and looked round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them. His eye wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had, probably, noticed the movement. They fell at last on Iris,–his next neighbor, you remember.
–We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that person’s eyes have been fixed on us.
Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person. Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine’s reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our backs. We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on. the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown light.
A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe, to that upon which we look. Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people’s chins yellow. When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to fill it. When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it. Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed. It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is “all horse”; and I have often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of its handle.
All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round the company. What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that wore the red jewel.
–If it were a possible thing,–women are such strange creatures! Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man–such as he is–out of it. I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
–A child,–yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child! Do you know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim. The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose. They say that leads to love.
–I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible. There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous- acid pungency in the air that stings one’s eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.–Oh,–oh,–oh! do you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison, I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I don’t pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons together;–and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other. When the young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman’s arm,–which so greatly shocked the Model, you may remember,–I saw that she had learned the lion- tamer’s secret. She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.
One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think have the largest capacity of loving;–and who can love like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
–Marry her, of course?–Why, no, not of course. I should think the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she to marry him.
There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements run to love in women of a certain–let us not say age, but youth. An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,–as she would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth’s “Boy of Windermere”? This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him
“with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled.”
When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.–Read the sonnet, if you please;–it is Wordsworth all over,–trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta- physically, but immensely suggestive of “imagination,” to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will come in next.
–Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.
I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman’s chamber. How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess. His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,- -it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,–whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that–I am a fool to confess it–I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so- called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,–a sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,–a young woman in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,–not a neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
Of course you don’t suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about the matter,–I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that nonsense out of any man’s head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n’t worry him much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,–the old man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the country-people have called it “the haunted house,”–the owners have n’t been able to let it since the last tenants left on account of the noises,–so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,– take the man who did n’t mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,–how do you think he will like it? He doesn’t believe one word of ghosts,–but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman’s chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that was founded on the landlady’s story of his having a pile of gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious and afford a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman’s voice; for, in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call the vox humana stop. If he moves his bed round to get away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that simple operation. Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such simple way. And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,–nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,–I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats’s terrible poem of “Lamia.”
There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie awake and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem to be alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime. Creak! There’s a door ajar; you know you shut them all.
Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly? or, worse than any body, is—-? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that jars all the windows;–very strange!–there does not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,–a stray animal, no doubt. All right,–but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle or a cry,–another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,–blown over, very likely—-Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
No,–night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,–foxes, and owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery and fear.
You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it should not be. Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times. But it is not so easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to mention. I think some of them are rather pleased to get “the Professor” under their ceilings.
The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and try some “old Burbon,” which he said was A 1. On asking him what was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-‘leven, sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn’t find it, if he did n’t go ahead to show me the way. I followed him to his habitat, being very willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my curiosity.
Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and “pants” and “vests,”–as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and pantaloons or trousers,–hanging up as if the owner had melted out of them. Several prints were pinned up unframed,–among them that grand national portrait-piece, “Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to Jenny Lind,” and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and especially the Italicized word, “Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,” and “Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith.” “Best three in five. Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50.”
That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is, as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living mechanism. I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26. Flora Temple has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less. Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember in public as low down as 2.20. From five to ten seconds, then, in about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the present race of trotting horses. The same thing is seen in the running of men. Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about 4.30 the maximum is reached. Averages of masses have been studied more than averages of maxima and minima. We know from the Registrar-General’s Reports, that a certain number of children–say from one to two dozen–die every year in England from drinking hot water out of spouts of teakettles. We know, that, among suicides, women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms. A woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or a gun. Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?
I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe to the sporting men more than to the philosophers. The lesson their experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,–does nothing per saltum. The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the chess-players. Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains approximate,–almost as closely as chronometers. Such a person is a “knight-player,”–he must have that piece given him. Another must have two pawns. Another, “pawn and two,” or one pawn and two moves. Then we find one who claims “pawn and move,” holding himself, with this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure to beat him playing even.–So much are minds alike; and you and I think we are “peculiar,”–that Nature broke her jelly-mould after shaping our cerebral convolutions. So I reflected, standing and looking at the picture.
–I say, Governor,–broke in the young man John,–them bosses ’11 stay jest as well, if you’ll only set down. I’ve had ’em this year, and they haven’t stirred.–He spoke, and handed the chair towards me,–seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
You have lived in this house some time?–I said,–with a note of interrogation at the end of the statement.
Do I look as if I’d lost much flesh–said he, answering my question by another.
No,–said I;–for that matter, I think you do credit to “the bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board.”
[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by a friend of the landlady’s, and paid for as an advertisement. This impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table. One of them was of the class of people who grumble if they don’t get canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week. The other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he ought to have been asleep in his bed. In this state he walked into several of the boarders’ chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases of somnambulism.]
If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has interrupted.
It a’n’t the feed,–said the young man John,–it’s the old woman’s looks when a fellah lays it in too strong. The feed’s well enough. After geese have got tough, ‘n’ turkeys have got strong, ‘n’ lamb’s got old, ‘n’ veal’s pretty nigh beef, ‘n’ sparragrass ‘s growin’ tall ‘n’ slim ‘n’ scattery about the head, ‘n’ green peas are gettin’ so big ‘n’ hard they’d be dangerous if you fired ’em out of a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season. But it’s too much like feedin’ on live folks and devourin’ widdah’s substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin’ way, when a fellah ‘s as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one ‘n’ not enough for two. I can’t help lookin’ at the old woman. Corned- beef-days she’s tolerable calm. Roastin’-days she worries some, ‘n’ keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves. But when there’s anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin’s so to see the knife goin’ into the breast and joints comin’ to pieces, that there’s no comfort in eatin’. When I cut up an old fowl and help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won’t you have a slice of widdah?–instead of chicken.
The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of “crackers,” as we Boston folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as being A 1.
Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and communicative.
It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who had excited my curiosity.
What do you think of our young Iris?–I began.
Fust-rate little filly;-he said.–Pootiest and nicest little chap I’ve seen since the schoolma’am left. Schoolma’am was a brown- haired one,–eyes coffee-color. This one has got wine-colored eyes,–‘n’ that ‘s the reason they turn a fellah’s head, I suppose.
This is a splendid blonde,–I said,–the other was a brunette. Which style do you like best?
Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?–said the young man John. Like ’em both,–it a’n’t the color of ’em makes the goodness. I ‘ve been kind of lonely since schoolma’am went away. Used to like to look at her. I never said anything particular to her, that I remember, but—
I don’t know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the young fellow’s feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
I suppose she wouldn’t have looked at a fellah like me,–he said,– but I come pretty near tryin’. If she had said, Yes, though, I shouldn’t have known what to have done with her. Can’t marry a woman now-a-days till you’re so deaf you have to cock your head like a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can’t see what she looks like nearer than arm’s-length.
Here is another chance for you,–I said.–What do you want nicer than such a young lady as Iris?
It’s no use,–he answered.–I look at them girls and feel as the fellah did when he missed catchin’ the trout.–‘To’od ‘a’ cost more butter to cook him ‘n’ he’s worth,–says the fellah.–Takes a whole piece o’ goods to cover a girl up now-a-days. I’d as lief undertake to keep a span of elephants,–and take an ostrich to board, too,–as to marry one of ’em. What’s the use? Clerks and counter-jumpers ain’t anything. Sparragrass and green peas a’n’t for them,–not while they’re young and tender. Hossback-ridin’ a’n’t for them,– except once a year, on Fast-day. And marryin’ a’n’t for them. Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young woman, to tell her how lonely he feels. And sometimes a fellah,– here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as if a little ashamed of his weakness,–sometimes a fellah would like to have one o’ them small young ones to trot on his knee and push about in a little wagon,–a kind of a little Johnny, you know;–it’s odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything, and the folks that are so poor they don’t want anything. It makes nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt! And it’s pleasant to see fine young girls sittin’, like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin’, and waitin’, and waitin’, ‘n’ no customers,–and the men lingerin’ round and lookin’ at the goods, like folks that want to be customers, but have n’t the money!
Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?–I said.
What! Little Boston ask that girl to marry him! Well, now, that’s cumin’ of it a little too strong. Yes, I guess she will marry him and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!–he said, mysteriously;–one of the boarders swears there’s a woman comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin’ and screechin’. I should like to know what he’s about in that den of his. He lays low ‘n’ keeps dark,–and, I tell you, there’s a good many of the boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don’t seem to want ’em. Biddy could tell somethin’ about what she’s seen when she ‘s been to put his room to rights. She’s a Paddy ‘n’ a fool, but she knows enough to keep her tongue still. All I know is, I saw her crossin’ herself one day when she came out of that room. She looked pale enough, ‘n’ I heard her mutterin’ somethin’ or other about the Blessed Virgin. If it had n’t been for the double doors to that chamber of his, I’d have had a squint inside before this; but, somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they’re both open at once.
What do you think he employs himself about? said I.
The young man John winked.
I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the blossom, to come to fruit in words.
I don’t believe in witches,–said the young man John.
Nor I.
We were both silent for a few minutes.
–Did you ever see the young girl’s drawing-books,–I said, presently.
All but one,–he answered;–she keeps a lock on that, and won’t show it. Ma’am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma’am Allen tried to peek into it one day when she left it on the sideboard. “If you please,” says she,–‘n’ took it from him, ‘n’ gave him a look that made him curl up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel. I only wished he had n’t, and had jest given her a little sass, for I’ve been takin’ boxin’- lessons, ‘n’ I ‘ve got a new way of counterin’ I want to try on to somebody.
–The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow’s room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so long. These were, to get a sight of the young girl’s drawing. book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a look into the Little Gentleman’s room.
I don’t doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble myself about these matters. You tell me, with some show of reason, that all I shall find in the young girl’s–book will be some outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing my own features figuring. Very likely. But I’ll tell you what I think I shall find. If this child has idealized the strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread her wings like a brooding dove,–if, in one of those wild vagaries that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles, depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of hers,–if I can ever get a look at it,–fairly, of course, for I would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman’s room under any fair pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery about him.
The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and many more reflections. It was about two o’clock in the morning,– bright starlight,–so light that I could make out the time on my alarm-clock,–when I woke up trembling and very moist. It was the heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me. Presently a window was softly closed. I had just begun to get over the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman’s voice,–the clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of. It was not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman’s voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair. It died away at last,–and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low, monotonous sound, as of one talking,–and then the closing of a door,–and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and all was still for the night.
By George! this gets interesting,–I said, as I got out of bed for a change of night-clothes.
I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n’t read it at our celebration. So I read it to the boarders instead, and print it to finish off this record with.
ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer His wandering flock had gone before,
But he, the shepherd, might not share Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
Before the Speedwell’s anchor swung,
Ere yet the Mayflower’s sail was spread, While round his feet the Pilgrims clung, The pastor spake, and thus he said:–
“Men, brethren, sisters, children dear! God calls you hence from over sea;
Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
“Ye go to bear the saving word
To tribes unnamed and shores untrod: Heed well the lessons ye have heard
From those old teachers taught of God.
“Yet think not unto them was lent
All light for all the coming days,
And Heaven’s eternal wisdom spent
In making straight the ancient ways.
“The living fountain overflows
For every flock, for every lamb,
Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose With Luther’s dike or Calvin’s dam.”
He spake; with lingering, long embrace, With tears of love and partings fond,
They floated down the creeping Maas, Along the isle of Ysselmond.
They passed the frowning towers of Briel, The “Hook of Holland’s” shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel
The sullen shores of Fatherland.
No home for these!–too well they knew The mitred king behind the throne;
The sails were set, the pennons flew, And westward ho! for worlds unknown.
–And these were they who gave us birth, The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
Who won for us this virgin earth,
And freedom with the soil they gave.
The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,–
In alien earth the exiles lie,–
Their nameless graves our holiest shrine, His words our noblest battle-cry!
Still cry them, and the world shall hear, Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
VIII
There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,–a beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature’s women, turned loose among live men.
-Terrible fact?
Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If jealousies that gnaw men’s hearts out of their bodies,–if pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping melancholy,–if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.–I love to look at this “Rainbow,” as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,–the very picture, as it seems to me, of that “golden blonde” my friend whose book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)–handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king’s bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women–let me add children–that there is a Great Secret waiting for them,–a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes,–second wakings, as it were,–a waking out of the waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great Cause. This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life. I do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life. Persons, however, have fallen into trances,–as did the Reverend William Tennent, among many others,–and learned some things which they could not tell in our human words.
Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery. There are women’s faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra Angelico,–and I just now came across a print of Raphael’s Santa Apollina, with something of the same quality,–which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no women to be worshipped.
But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it. Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can she tell me anything?
Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired of, and through–Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,–a huge unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul’s highway,– now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
I wish the girl would go. I don’t like to look at her so much, and yet I cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to know,–something that she was made to tell and I to hear,–lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set your mind at ease about that,–there are reasons I could give you which settle all that matter. I don’t wonder, however, that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell. When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl’s eye or lip to the “I love you” in her heart. But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean. No, women’s faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I think,– Wordsworth might be one of them,–spell out a portion of it from certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies. I have known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,–all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died. The vulgar called them drunkards.
I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this young girl’s face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices. I cannot translate it into words,–only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.
You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young girl’s face. You forget what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick. From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler’s impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young girl’s face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman’s face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being understood;–
That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me
To him my tale I teach.
–I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for this August number, so that they will never see it.
–Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you will make the change.
This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all the men’s eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to look.
That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
–Sarvant, Ma’am I Much obleeged,–he said, and put it gallantly in his button-hole.–After breakfast he must see some of her drawings. Very fine performances,–very fine!–truly elegant productions, truly elegant!–Had seen Miss Linwood’s needlework in London, in the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)- patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,–elegant, truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of them;–wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy. Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
“Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass’d With me but roughly since I heard thee last.”
And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them. –What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man’s memory of a mother who died in his earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.
If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman’s face, the words with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.
–If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!–he said. –All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you don’t want to see.–The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
How many drawing-books have you filled,–I said,–since you began to take lessons?–This was the first,–she answered,–since she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had covered with drawings.
I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies, principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb drawing of an arm! I don’t remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.–Oh!
–Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,–I said, taking up the drawing-book with a lock on it,–Yes,–she said.–I should like to see her style of working on a small scale.–There was nothing in it worth showing,–she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven’t the least doubt. I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else. The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady’s daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,–somebody has, at any rate.–I saw a book she had, which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,–a face from memory, apparently,–one of those faces that small children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are “good men,” and that heaven is full of such.–The gentleman with the diamond–the Koh-i-noor, so called by us–was not encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,– which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing comes of all this,–and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding out the girl’s fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman’s chamber. For this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed him as he toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced round toward me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there! So we finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.–No answer.–Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,–with unnecessary noise, I thought,–and he came into the passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as “Mr. Copley” used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,–a schoolgirl’s secrets and a whimsical man’s habits. I mean to give up such nonsense and mind my own business.–Hark! What the deuse is that odd noise in his chamber?
–I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,–I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks called the “Devil’s footsteps.” These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the “dewberry,” as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,–where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet “everlasting” could not grow, but all was bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near my home,–the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,–little having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible. The queer burnt spots, called the “Devil’s footsteps,” had never attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a “Goody,” so called, or sweeper, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know something.–I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret,–with the “Devil’s footsteps” in the fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity.
There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced by these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other’s backs,–as the people did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady’s portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,–marks of the British officers’ rapiers,–and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,–confound them for smashing its mate?–and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;–he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,–“the study” in my father’s time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men,–sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you the “dents” left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with them;–of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)–of dreams coming true,–of death-signs,–of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
Jeremy Bentham’s logic, by which he proved that he couldn’t possibly see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man’s head. That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for the present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy full of material images,–faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so forth,–in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time. It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I should sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same curious interest with which one who has ventured into a “gift enterprise” examines the “massive silver pencil-case” with the coppery smell and impressible tube, or the “splendid gold ring” with the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to obtain in addition to his purchase.
The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But there is this difference between its view and that of a person looking at us:–we look from within, and see nothing but the mould formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look from without, and see us as living statues. To be sure, by the aid of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul from within outward which none but ourselves can take. A portrait is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us. The artist looks only from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces we are never likely to see. No genuine expression can be studied by the subject of it in the looking-glass.
More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last record, if you happened to read that document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take any one of these special views. Suppose he should copy you as you appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board. Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation. The artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype and photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time or to any particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call “as nat’ral as life.” Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness in your countenance.
He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:
There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never thought I had a sign of it. The mother’s eyebrow and grayish-