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The great annual fair at NIZHNEE-Novgorod.
Crystal palace—London exhibition building, 1851.
Interior view of the transept of crystal palace.
New York exhibition building, 1853.
Cork exhibition building, 1853.
Dublin exhibition building, 1853.
Munich exhibition building, 1854.
Manchester exhibition building, 1857.
Florence exhibition building, 1861
Paris exposition building and grounds, 1867.
Grand vestibule of the Paris exposition building, 1867.
Vienna exposition building and grounds, 1873.
Rotunda of the Vienna exposition building, 1873.
Mussulman woman of bhopal.
A nautch-girl (or bayadere) of Ulwur.
A NAUTCHNI (or bayadere) of Baroda.
The cathacks (or dancing men) of bhopal.
Burial place of the rajahs of jhansi.
Tomb of Allum Sayed.
Peasants of the Douab.
Hindu bankers of Delhi.
The grand hall of the Dewani Khas in the palace of Delhi.
The Jammah masjid at Delhi.
LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE
POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
Vol. XVII, No. 99.
III.—PAST EXPOSITIONS.
[Illustration: The great annual fair at NIZHNEE-Novgorod.]
We have presented a feeble sketch of a century that stands out from its fellows, not as a mere continuation, or even intensification, of them—a hundred annual circuits of the earth in its orbit as little distinguished by intellectual or material achievement as those repetitions of the old beaten track through space are by astronomical incident—but as an epoch sui generis, a century d’elite, picked out from the long ranks of time for special service, charged by Fate with an extraordinary duty, and decorated for its successful performance. Those of its historic comrades even partially so honored are few indeed. They will not make a platoon—scarce a corporal’s guard. We should seek them, for instance, in the Periclean age, when eternal beauty, and something very like eternal truth, gained a habitation upon earth through the chisel and the pen; in the first years of the Roman empire, when the whole temperate zone west of China found itself politically and socially a unit, at rest but for the labors of peace; and in the sixteenth century, when the area fit for the support of man was suddenly doubled, when the nominal value of his possessions was additionally doubled by the mines of Mexico and Peru, and when his mental implements were in a far greater proportion multiplied by the press.
[Illustration: Crystal palace—London exhibition building, 1851.]
The last of these periods comes nearest to our standard. The first had undying brilliance in certain fields, but the scope of its influence was geographically narrow, and its excessively active thought was not what we are wont to consider practically productive, its conquests in the domain of physical science being but slender. The second was in no sense originative, mankind being occupied, quietly and industriously, in making themselves comfortable in the pleasant hush after the secular rattle of spear and shield. The third was certainly full of results in art, science and the diffusion of intelligence through the upper and middle strata of society. It might well have celebrated the first centennial of the discovery of printing or of the discovery of America by assembling the fresh triumphs of European art, so wonderful to us in their decay, with the still more novel productions of Portuguese India and Spanish America. But the length of sea—voyages prosecuted in small vessels with imperfect knowledge of winds and currents, and the difficulties of land-transportation when roads were almost unknown, would have restricted the display to meagre proportions, particularly had Vienna been the site selected. Few visitors could have attended from distant countries, and the masses of the vicinage could only have stared. The idea, indeed, of getting up an exhibition to be chiefly supported by the intelligent curiosity of the bulk of the people would not have been apt to occur to any one. The political and educational condition of these was at the end of the century much what it had been at the beginning. Labor and the laborer had gained little.
The weapon-show, depicted in Old Mortality, and the market-fair, as vivid in the Vicar of Wakefield, exemplify the expositions of those days. To them were added a variety of church festivals, or “functions,” still a great feature of the life of Catholic countries. Trade and frolic divided these among themselves in infinite gradation of respective share, now the ell-wand, and now the quarter-staff or the fiddler’s bow, representing the sceptre of the Lord of Misrule. “At Christe’s Kirk on the Grene that day” the Donnybrook element would appear to have predominated. The mercantile feature was naturally preferred by gentle Goldy, and the hapless investor in green spectacles may be counted the first dissatisfied exhibitor on record at a modern exposition, for he skirts the century.
Looking eastward, we find these rallies of the people, the time-honored stalking-grounds of tale-writers and students of character generally, swell into more imposing proportions. The sea dwindles and the land broadens. Transportation and travel become difficult and hazardous. Merchant and customer, running alike a labyrinthine gauntlet of taxes, tolls and arbitrary exactions by the wolves of schloss and
[Illustration: Interior view of the transept of crystal palace.]
To us it seems odd that in the days when an autocratic decree could summarily call up “all the world” to be taxed, and when, in prompt obedience to it, the people of all the regions gathered to a thousand cities, the idea of numbering and comparing, side by side, goods, handicrafts, arts, skill, faculties and energies, as well as heads, never occurred to rulers or their counselors. If it did, it was never put in practice. The difficulties to which we have before adverted stood in the way of that combination
[Illustration: New York exhibition building, 1853.]
At the annual exposition of the Olympic games we have the feature of a distribution of prizes. They were conferred, however, only on horses, poets and athletes—a conjunction certainly in advance of the asses and savants that constituted the especial care of the French army in Egypt, but not up to the modern idea of the comprehensiveness of human effort. While our artists confess it almost a vain hope to rival the cameo brooch that fastened the scanty garment of the Argive charioteer, or the statue spattered with the foam of his horses and shrouded in the dust of his furious wheel—while they are content to be teachable, moreover, by the exquisite embroidery and lacework in gold and cotton thread displayed at another semi-religious and similarly ancient reunion at Benares,—they claim the alliance and support of many classes of craftsmen unrepresented on the Ganges or Ilissus. These were, in the old days, ranked with slaves, many of whom were merchants and tradesmen; and they labor yet in some countries under the social ban of courts, no British merchant or cotton-lord, though the master of millions, being presentable at Buckingham Palace, itself the product of the counting-room and the loom. Little, however, does this slight appear to affect the sensibilities of the noble army of producers, who loyally rejoice to elevate their constitutional sovereign on their implements as the Frankish proletaries did upon their shields.
The family of expositions with which we are directly concerned is, like others of plebeian origin, at some loss as to the roots of its ancestral tree. We may venture to locate them in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1756-57 the London Society of Arts offered prizes for specimens of decorative manufactures, such as tapestry, carpets and porcelain. This was part of the same movement with that which brought into being the Royal Academy, with infinitely less success in the promotion of high art than has attended the development of taste, ingenuity and economy in the wider if less pretentious field.
France’s first exhibition of industry took place in 1798. It was followed by others under the Consulate and Empire in 1801, 1802, 1806. In 1819 the French expositions became regular. Each year attested an advance, and drew more and more the attention of adjacent countries. The international idea had not yet suggested itself. The tendency was rather to the less than the more comprehensive,
The getting up of a World’s Fair was an afterthought; the original design having been simply an illustration of British industrial advancement, in friendly rivalry with that which was becoming, across the Channel, too brilliant to be ignored. The government’s contribution, in the first instance, was meagre enough—merely the use of a site. Rough discipline in youth is England’s system with all her bantlings. She is but a frosty parent if at bottom kindly, and, when she has a shadow of justification, proud. In the present instance she stands excused by the sore shock caused her conservatism by the conceit of a building of glass and iron four times as long as St. Paul’s, high enough to accommodate comfortably one of her ancestral elms, and capacious enough to sustain a general invitation to all mankind to exhibit and admire.
Novelty and innovation attended the first step of the great movement. The design of the structure made architects rub their eyes, and yet its origin was humble and practical enough. The Adam of crystal palaces, like him of Eden, was a gardener. When Joseph Paxton raised the palm-house at Chatsworth he little suspected that he was building for the world—that, to borrow a simile from his own vocation, he was setting a bulb which would expand into a shape of as wide note as the domes of Florence and St. Sophia. And the cost of his new production was so absurdly low—eighty thousand pounds by the contract. The cheapness of his plan was its great merit in the eyes of the committee, and that which chiefly determined its selection over two hundred and forty-four competitors. This new cathedral for the apotheosis of industry resembled those of the old worship in the attributes of nave, aisles and transepts; and these features have been, by reason in great degree of the requirements of construction, continued in its successors. Galleries were added to the original design to secure space additional to what was naturally deemed at first an ample allowance for all comers. Before ground had been well broken the demands of British exhibitors alone ran up to four hundred and seventeen thousand superficial feet instead of the two hundred and ten thousand—half the whole area—allotted them. The United States were offered forty thousand feet; France, fifty thousand, afterward increased to sixty-five; the Zollverein, thirty thousand, and India the same. A comparison of the whole number of exhibitors, as distributed between Great Britain
[Illustration: Cork exhibition building, 1853.]
The first of the great fairs, in so many respects a model to all that came after, was beset at the outset by the same difficulty in arrangement encountered by them. How to reconcile the two headings of subjects and nations, groups of objects and groups of exhibitors, the endowments and progress of different races and the advance of mankind generally in the various fields of effort, was, and is, a problem only approximately to be solved. It was yet more complicated in 1851 from the compression of the entire display into one building of simple and symmetrical form, instead of dispersing certain classes of objects, bulky and requiring special appliances for their proper display, into subsidiary structures—the plan so effectively employed in Fairmount Park. A sort of compromise was arrived at which rendered possible the mapping of both countries and subjects, especially in the reports, and to some extent in the exhibition itself, without making the spectacle one of confusion. The visitor was enabled to accomplish his double voyage through the depths of the sea of glass without a great deal of backing and filling, and to find his log, after it was over, reasonably coherent.
The articles displayed were ranged under thirty heads. The preponderance of matter of fact was shown in the concession of four of these to raw material, nineteen to manufactures, and one to the fine arts. Twenty-nine atoms of earth to one of heaven! Of course the one-thirtieth whereinto the multiform and elastic shape of genius was invited, like the afreet into his chest, to condense itself, had to be subdivided—an intaglio and a temple, a scarabaeus and a French battle-picture, being very different things. This was accomplished, and the Muses made as comfortable as could be expected. They soon asserted the pre-eminence theirs by right
On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St. Paul’s and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off their feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused the composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome, filled with the volume of harmony, “Cosa stupenda! stupenda! La gloria d’Inghilterra!”
A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron—from a concord of sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the “duty” of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is. The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal ratio. The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.
Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the like. The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances beating Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the most adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination
[Illustration: Dublin exhibition building, 1853.]
In crude materials the Union is at home. It was so in 1851, and is still; but then it was not so much at home in anything else as now. We have advanced in that field too, since we sent no silver, and from Colorado no gold, no canned fruits, meats or fish, and no wine but some Cincinnati Catawba, thin and acid, according to the verdict of the imbibing jury. We adventured timidly into manufacturing competition with the McCormick reaper, which all Europe proceeded straightway to pirate; ten or twelve samples of cotton and three of woolen goods; Ericsson’s caloric-engine; a hydrostatic pump; some nautical instruments; Cornelius’s chandeliers for burning lard oil—now the light of other days, thanks to our new riches in kerosene; buggies of a tenuity so marvelous in Old-World eyes that their half-inch tires were likened to the miller of Ferrette’s legs, so thin that Talleyrand pronounced his standing an act of the most desperate bravery; soap enough to answer Coleridge’s cry for a detergent for the lower Rhine; and one bridge model, forerunner of the superb iron erections that have since leaped over rivers and ravines in hundreds.
Meagre enough was the display of our craftsmen by the side of that made by their brethren of the other side. It could have been scarce visible to Britannia, looking down from a pinnacle of calico ready for a year’s export over and above her home consumption, long enough, if unrolled, to put a girdle thirty times round the globe, though not all of it warranted to stand the washing-test that would be imposed by the briny part of the circuit.
And yet there were visible in the American department germs of original inventions and adaptations, the development and fructification of which in the near future were foreseen by acute observers. Our metallic life-boats were then unknown to other countries, those of England being all of wood. The screw-propeller was quite a new thing, though the Princeton had carried it, or been carried by it, into the Mediterranean ten years before. Engines designed for its propulsion
We sent no steam fire-engines, no locomotives, and no cars. Our great printing-presses, since largely borrowed from and imported by Europe, were scarcely noticed. Not so with “a most beautiful little machine” for making card wire-cloth, copied from America. Recognition of the supreme merits of the pianos of Chickering, Steinway and the rest was still wanting, Erard’s Parisian instruments bearing the bell. Borden’s meat-biscuit—to revert to the practical—caused quite a sensation, the Admiralty being overloaded with spoiled and condemned preserved meat. The American daguerreotypes on exhibition were pronounced decidedly superior to those of France, and still more to those of England. Whipple displayed the first photograph taken of the moon, thus securing to this country the credit of having broken ground for the application of the new art to astronomy. No photograph of a star or of the sun had been obtained. The distance between the United States and Europe in the application and improvement of photography cannot be said, notwithstanding our advantage in climate, to have been since widened. A field of competition still lies open before them in the fixing of color by the camera and the sensitive surface. The sun still insists on doing his work with India ink and keeping his spectral palette strictly to himself. For cheap and popular renderings of color man was then, as now, fain to have recourse to the press. The English exhibited some chromatic printing, far inferior to the chromo-lithographs of today.
And this brings us to art. One out of thirty in the programme, it was, as it always will be on these occasions, nearer thirty to one in the estimation of assembled sight-seers. The dry goods and machinery, even the bald, shadeless and ugly (however comfortable) model cottages of the inevitable Prince Albert, failed to draw like the things which flattered the lust of the eye; as the pigs and pumpkins of an “agricultural horse-trot” attract but a wayside glance from the procession to the grand stand. We are all dwellers in a vast picture-gallery, with frescoed dome above and polychromed sculpture and mosaic pavement on the floor below. Its merits we perceive, enjoy and interpret according to our individual gifts and education. But it makes amateurs in some sort of every mother’s son or daughter, of us; and we hasten to plunge, confident each in his particular grammar of the beautiful, into the study of what imitative
There they saw the diamond put into harness by the Hindus and used for drilling gems as it is now for drilling railway tunnels. In the carpets and shawls of the same region was to be traced an exact and unfaltering instinct for color, the tints falling into their proper places like those of the rainbow—the result not a picture, any more than the rainbow is a picture, but a blotted study rubbed up with the palette-knife, or what in music would be a fantasia.
[Illustration: Munich exhibition building, 1854.]
From the Asiatic display, more complete by far than any before known, the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and the more scholastic color-notions of Europe. There was young Munich with Mueller’s lions and the anti-realistic figures of Schwanthaler; Austria with Monti’s veiled heads, henceforth to be credited to Lombardy; Prussia with Rauch; and Denmark with Thorwaldsen—all pure form, copied without color from Nature, from convention and from the antique. Then came design and color united in ceramics—in the marvelously delicate flowers of Dresden, purified in the porcelain-furnace as by fire; in the stately vases of Sevres, just but varied in proportion, unfathomable in the rich depths of their ground-shadows, and exact and brilliant in the superimposed details; the more raw but promising efforts of Berlin, marked, like the jewelry from the same city, by faithful study of Nature; and, blending the decorative with the economic, the works of the English Wedgwoods and Mintons, infinite in variety of style and utility, and often pleasing in design. Italy, though supplying from her ancient stores so many of the models and so much of the inspiration of the countries named, seems to have forgotten Faenza and Etruria, and to prefer solid stone as a material to preparations of clay and flint. Her Venetian glass has markedly declined, at the same time that glass elsewhere—notably, the stained windows of Munich and the smaller objects of France and Bohemia—shows a great advance in perfection of manufacture and manageability for art purposes.
In that debatable land where the artistic and the convenient meet at the fire-side and the tea-table, English invention, enterprise and solicitude for the comfort and presentability of home shone conspicuous. Domestic art finds in the island a congenial home, and helps to make one for the islanders. English interiors, often incongruous and sombre in their decorations, at least produce the always pleasant sensation of physical comfort, the attainment of which the average Briton will class among the fine arts. Lovely as the Graces are, they need a little editing to harmonize them with a coal fire.
This halfway house of the nineteenth century, the house of glass in which it boldly ensconced itself to throw stones at its benighted relations, will ever be a landmark to the traveler over the somewhat arid expanse of industrial and commercial history. Its humblest statistics will be preserved, and coming generations will read with interest that 42,809 persons visited it, on an average, each day, that these rose on one day to 109,915, and that there were at one time in the building 93,224, or six thousand more than Domitian’s most tempting and sanguinary bill of theatrical fare could have drawn into the Coliseum. Its length, by the way, was exactly equal to the circumference of the Flavian amphitheatre—1848 feet.
A new home (of progress)! who’ll follow? “I,” quoth New York. The British empire had taken three years in preparation: New York was ready with less than two. Not quite ready, either, we are apt to say now, but most creditably so for the time and the means of a few enterprising private men bestowed upon it. And up to this time the display of ’53 under the Karnak-like shadow of the Croton Reservoir has not been equaled on our soil.
Architecturally, the building was superior to that of London, and showed itself less cramped by the peculiarities of the novel material. The form was that of a Greek cross, with a central dome a hundred and forty-eight feet high, and eight towers at the salients of seventy feet. The space, including galleries, did not reach a third of that afforded by its prototype, but proved equal to the demand.
Considering the absence of any formal public character in the movement and the brief notice, foreign exhibitors came forward in tolerable force. They could not expect to address through this display each other’s commercial constituencies, as very few visitors would traverse the Atlantic: they could reach only the people of the United States. This difficulty must interfere—though much less now than twenty years ago, when the means of ocean-travel were but a fraction of what they are at present—with the strictly international complexion of any exposition in this country. If, however—as we are already assured beyond peradventure will be the case with the Centennial—our neighbors over the way send us a full representation of their products, and a delegation of visitors from their most intelligent classes, not inferior in numbers, for example, to the Germans who went to London, and the English who repaired in ’73 to Vienna, we shall claim a cosmopolitan character for our exposition, and hold that it well fills its place in the line of progress.
What Europe did send to New York sufficed to prove the superiority of our own artisans in such labor-saving contrivances as suited the conditions of the country. The foreign implements and machines were more cumbrous in both complexity and weight of parts than ours. In the finer departments of manufacture, the Gobelin tapestry, the French glass, porcelain and silks, the broadcloths of England and Prussia, and a host of other such articles, could expect no rivalry here. The slender contributions of statuary and paintings hardly sufficed to illustrate the conceded superiority of the Old World in art. Crawford and Powers did very well by the side of the other, disciples of the antique, their chief opposition coming from some indifferent plaster-casts of Thorwaldsen’s Twelve Apostles. In point of popularity, Kiss’s spirited melodramatic group of the Amazon and Tiger threw them all into the shade. Its triumph at London was almost as marked, and the innumerable reductions of it met with everywhere show it to be one of the few hits of modern sculpture.
The general result of the exhibition was to encourage our manufacturers, without giving them a great deal of food for higher ambition; while our artists and the taste of their patrons, actual and possible, were disappointed of the instruction they had reason to expect, and which the ateliers of Europe will supply in fuller measure this year.
The succeeding years present us with an epidemic of expositions, most of them, often on the slenderest grounds, arrogating the title of “international.” The sprightly little city of Cork was one year ahead of New York. Then came Dublin in ’53, Munich in ’54, Paris in ’55, Manchester in ’57 (of art exclusively, and very brilliant), Florence in ’61, London again in ’62, Amsterdam in ’64; and in ’65 the mania had overspread the globe, that year witnessing exhibitions dubbed “international” in Dublin, New Zealand, Oporto, Cologne and Stettin, with perhaps some outliers we have missed. Then ensued a lull or a mitigation till the moribund empire of France and the remodeled empire of Austro-Hungary flared up into the magnificent demonstrations of ’67 and ’73. To these last we shall devote the remainder of this article, with but a glance at the second British of 1862.
[Illustration: MANCHESTER EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1857.]
This, held upon the same ground with its forerunner of eleven years previous, affords a better measure of progress. It developed a manifest advance in designs for ornamental manufactures. The schools of decorative art were beginning to tell. Carpets, hangings, furniture, stuffs for wear, encaustic tiles, etc. showed a sounder taste; and this in the foreign as well as the British stalls. French porcelain was more fully represented than before, and in finer designs. The Paris exhibition of ’55, more extensively planned, though less of a financial success, than the London one it followed, was not without effect on the industry and art-culture of France. The United States also showed that they had not been idle. Our fabrics of vulcanized rubber and sewing-machines were boons to Europe she has not been slow to seize. The latter are now sold in England, with trifling modifications and new trademarks, at from one-third to one-half the price our people have to pay.
The secret of making money out of these great fairs seemed to have been lost. Although England’s second took in much more than the first, and four times as much as the first French, four hundred and sixty thousand pounds having entered its treasury, it failed to leave any such profitable memorials of profit.
By this time the spirit of French emulation was stirred to its inmost depths. They had gone to London, argued the Gauls, under every disadvantage. To prove that they had returned covered with glory, they hunted every nook and corner of numerical analysis. Out of 18,000 exhibitors of all nations, they had had but 1747, and yet Paris had received thirty-nine council medals, or honors of the first order, per million of inhabitants, against fourteen per million accorded to London. She had beaten the metropolis of fog not only in general, but in detail. In every branch, from the most solid to the most sentimental, she was victorious. For machinery a million of gamins beat a million of Cockneys in the proportion of seven to six; in the economical and chemical arts, four to one; in the geographical and geometrical, eight to three; and in the fine arts, Waterloo was reversed to the tune of twenty to four.
Nothing could be more conclusive; but to take a bond of fate it was determined to imitate England in trying a second display, and supplement ’53 with ’67 more effectively than Albion had ’51 with ’62. In what gallant style this determination was carried out we all remember. France did put forth her strength. She illustrated the Second Empire with an outpouring of her own genius and energy the variety and comprehensiveness of which no other nation could pretend to equal; and she called together the nearest approach to a rally of the nations that had yet been seen.
The casket of these assembled treasures was hardly worthy of them, so far as the effect of the mass went. It needed a facade as badly as does a confectioner’s plum-cake. Had the vitreous mass been dumped upon the Champs de Mars from the clouds in a viscous state like the Alpine mers de glace, it would have assumed much such a thick disk-like shape as it actually wore. Then decorate it with some spun-sugar pinnacles and some flags of silver paper, and the confiseur stood confessed. Nevertheless, motive was there. Catch anything French without it.
[Illustration: FLORENCE EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1861]
The pavilion consisted of seven concentric ovals, the arcs and their radii effecting the duplicate division of objects and countries. Outside, under the eaves and in the surrounding area, the peoples were encamped around their possessions. The gastric fluid being the universal solvent, the festive board was assigned the position nearest the building, a continuous shed protecting the restaurants of all nations, each with its proper specialty in the way of viands and service. Necessarily, there was in the carrying out of the latter idea a good deal
The United States government took particular interest in this exposition, and published a long and detailed report made by its commissioners. Our contributions were not worthy of the country, and showed but little novelty. Implements of farming and of war, pianos, sewing-machines and locomotives attracted chief attention. The pianos were “unreservedly praised.” The wines, California having come to the rescue, were pronounced an improvement on previous specimens. The only trait of our engines that was admired or borrowed appears to have been that which had least to do with the organism of the machine—the cab. In cars our ideas have fruited better, and Pullman and Westinghouse have gained a firm foothold in England, with whose endorsement their way is open across the Channel. In the arts we are credited with seventy-five pictures, against a hundred and twenty-three from England and six hundred and fifty-two from France.
[Illustration: PARIS EXPOSITION BUILDING AND GROUNDS, 1867.]
Here France was at home, and felt it. The works of Dubray, Triquetti, Yvon, Giraud, Gerome, Dubufe, Toulmouche, Courbet, Troyon, Rosa Bonheur and others exhibited the route toward the naturalistic taken by her modern school, so different from that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. The Duesseldorf school has been drawn into the same path—France’s one conquest from Prussia, who made at the same time a stout struggle in defence of the classic manner through Kaulbach. The drawings and paintings of art-students maintained by the French government in Italy attested an enlightened liberality other governments, general or local, would do well to imitate. The cost of supporting a few score of pupils in Rome could in no way be better bestowed for the promotion of commerce, manufactures and education. Taste has unquestionably a high economic value. But this is only one of France’s ways of recognizing the fact. The government Ecole des Beaux Arts at Paris contained, in 1875, a hundred and seventy-two students of architecture, a hundred and eighty-three of painting, forty of sculpture and two hundred and fifty of engraving.
As a corollary to this assiduous culture, French art collectively was at the exposition “first, and the rest nowhere.” The old works sent by Italy stood by themselves; and in mosaic, Salviati’s glass, and statuary led by Vela’s Last Moments of Napoleon, the modern studios of that country ranked in the front. Prussia had some heliographic maps, then a new thing, and chromos, also in the bud; Austria and England, fine architectural drawings; and Eastlake, Stanfield, Landseer, Frith and Faed crossed pencils with the French. But nothing modern of the kind could stand by the porcelain of Sevres, the glass of St. Louis and Baccarat, the bronzes of other French producers, the vast collection of drawings of ancient and mediaeval monuments and architecture in France, her book-binding and illustration by Bida and Dore, her jewelry and her art-manufactures as a whole. In carriages she had obviously studied the turnouts of American workshops to advantage.
In agricultural machinery all civilized exhibitors had gone to school to our artisans.
One of our specialties, a postal-car, appeared under the Prussian flag. So did things more legitimately the property of the nascent empire. The Krupp gun cast its substance, as well as its shadow, before. A locomotive destined for India made Bull rub his eyes. Chemicals in every grade of purity spoke the potency of the German alembic.
The probability that the production of beetroot-sugar would before many years attain a position among the industries of this country gave interest in the eyes of American visitors to the display of European machinery employed so successfully in that business. Labor-saving machinery we have not generally been in the habit of borrowing. Neither, on the other hand, has Europe been accustomed to draw from us crude material for the finest manufactures; and the balance was set even by the admirable quality of the glass made from American sand and the porcelain moulded in American kaolin. The latter substance, a silicate of alumina, is not found in England, and at but few points on the Continent. We have it in abundance and of the finest quality.
[Illustration: GRAND VESTIBULE OF THE PARIS EXPOSITION BUILDING, 1867.]
The extraordinary steps made within five years in the arts of destruction were illustrated by the twelve-inch Armstrong rifles of England and the Essen gun, throwing a 1212-pound shot. In 1862 the heaviest projectile shown did not exceed one hundred pounds. For field-service the limit of practice in weight seems long ago to have been reached: for forts and ships it cannot be far off. Armor and projectiles must soon bring each other to a standstill; as when, in the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, offence and defence reached the reductio ad absurdum of the incapacity of men-at-arms to inflict serious injury upon each other, or even to pick themselves up when the weight of their armor, with some aid from
[Illustration: VIENNA EXPOSITION BUILDING AND GROUNDS, 1873.]
Since 1851 a new commercial cement had come into operation in the adoption by neighboring powers of the French metrical system. England and America still hold out against the metre and the gramme; and the press of both occasionally levels at it the old jokes of making the spheres weigh a pound of butter and the polar axis measure a yard of calico. With the innovation, however, our merchants have become perforce familiar, a large share of their imported commodities being invoiced in accordance with it. Its immense superiority to our complicated and arbitrary weights and measures, in the tables whereof the same word often has half a dozen meanings, is beyond argument. In the United States it has earned a quasi-official adoption, but the force of habit among the people has yet to be overcome.
We may here give, in evidence of the increasing hold these expositions have upon the popular mind, the gradual multiplication of the numbers exhibiting. At London, in ’51, the exhibitors were 13,937; at Paris, ’55, 23,954; at London, ’62, 28,653; and at Paris, ’67, 50,226.
Austria, with admirable spirit, determined to anticipate her turn to enter the lists of peace. Undismayed by Solferino and Sadowa, she had found her Antaeus in Andrassy. Her capital city was advancing with immense strides in beauty and extent. Geographically and ethnically it was, like the empire itself, a meeting-ground of north and south, east and west. Isolated from the sea, it offered for the transport of heavy articles a system of railways proved by the event to be sufficiently effective. It was decided that the march of progress should be more than kept up, and that the building, with its appendages, should be an improvement on all its predecessors in extent, in architectural effect and in solidity of material. The dimensions are so variously stated, owing largely to difference of opinion as to what should be embraced within the admeasurement, that we are at a loss how to give them. To the main building, however, was assigned a capacity of seventy-three thousand five hundred and ninety-three square metres. Sixty-three hundred and eighty of these were awarded to France, ten metres less to England; and thirteen hundred and sixty to the United States. The marquee-like rotunda rose to a height of two hundred and fifty feet, with a diameter at base of three hundred and fifty-four. The principal entrance, with piers and arches of cut stone profusely decorated with statues and reliefs, was in highly satisfactory contrast to the fragile shells of glass and cast iron that sheltered the earlier exhibitions.
[Illustration: ROTUNDA OF THE VIENNA EXPOSITION BUILDING, 1873.]
Perhaps in all this solid work the demands of time had not been duly considered. Certainly, the display was not punctual to the appointed period of opening. Exceptionally bad weather was another drawback, and the greed of the Viennese hotel-keepers a third. For such, among other reasons, the enterprise was financially a failure—a fact which little concerns those who went to study and learn, and those who three years later have to describe. If the darkening of the imperial exchequer prove more than a passing shadow, and an ultimate loss on the speculation cease to be matter of question, the few millions it cost may be recovered by the disbanding of a regiment or two. For one brigade, out of half a million soldiers, to bring the world and its wealth to the seat of government, is doing better than the usual work of the bayonet.
The country and the city themselves were a study to foreigners in many of the modes of life. The extent to which the utilization, as stationary and locomotive machines, of pigs, cows, women and dogs was carried elicited constant remark from the Western tourists, with sundry moral conclusions perhaps too hastily arrived at. This outside feature of the exposition may serve as an admonition to put our own surroundings in order. They are not apt to expose us to such comments as naturally occur to those who have never seen dogs and damsels in harness together; but other vulnerable points may peradventure be descried. We must demonstrate our civilization to be complete at all points, and not simply a coddled exotic under glass. What if our Viennese guests, physically a stouter race than we, should pronounce our women too obviously not hod-carriers, and painfully unaccustomed to wheeling anything heavier than an arm-chair or a piano-stool?
In that land of music concerts could not fail to be a leading feature. The Boston improvement of emphasizing the bass with discharges of distant artillery, or its equivalent, the slamming of cellar-doors nearer by, was not attained. Noise and harmony were kept at arm’s length apart.
The illustration of homes was made a specialty. As at Paris, the peoples brought their dwellings, or, more often, the dwellings came without their occupants. The four-footed and feathered live-stock were of more indubitable authenticity. The display of all the European breeds of cattle and horses—English Durhams, Alderneys and racers, Russian trotters, Holstein cows and Flemish mares, the gray oxen of Hungary and the buffaloes of the Campagna, the wild red pigs of the Don and the razor-backs of Southern France—was calculated to amuse, if but moderately to edify, our breeders of Ohio, Kentucky and New York. A thousand horses and fifteen hundred horned cattle comprised this congress, while two hundred and fifty pigs were deemed enough to represent the grunters of all nations.
Of animals in another form, the preserved meats of Australia, sent sound across the tropics to the amount of seventeen thousand tons in 1872, against four tons in 1866, had their use of instruction to our packers. So with the improved display of agricultural produce from Southern Russia, our chief competitor in the grain-market. Our reapers and threshers are supplanting, in Eastern Europe, the ridiculous flails, sickles and straight-handled scythes that figured at New York in 1853. We have sent the Dacians, Huns and Sarmatians weapons to cut our own commercial throats. There are more enriching articles of export than wheat, as we must continue to learn.
In turning to other provinces, we find that England was foremost in machinery, the United States, “the only rival,” says a British critic, “from whom we had anything to fear,” being feebly represented, as we were in other respects, thanks to certain irregularities in the management of our commissioners sufficiently discussed at the time. The British carpets out-shone the display of any competitor, the influence of her new schools of decorative design being unmistakably marked.
The Aubusson carpets of France still maintained their position, as did the velvet, faience, tapestry, engravings, books, marine photographs, etc. of the same country. Italy made her usual contribution in the arts. Among the Austrian objects of this class the opals of Hungary were prominent.
India was unexpectedly complete in her collection: not only her modern industry, but her antiquities, had abundant specimens.
Much criticism has been expended upon the alleged lavish and indiscriminate distribution of medals and diplomas at Vienna. But, however numerous the undeserving who obtained them, the deserving must at the same time have had their share: the shower that fell on the unjust could not have missed the just. Therefore we note that, despite our slender show, one hundred and seventy-eight medals for Merit and sixty-nine for Progress, two for the Fine Arts (German Bierstadt and French Healey) and five for Good Taste, came to America. The National Bureau of Education, the Lighthouse Board and the State of Massachusetts obtained “Grand Diplomas of Honor” for documents. The like honor was awarded to the city of Boston and the Smithsonian Institution, and to four private exhibitors for the more palpable contributions of tool-making machinery, steam-machinery, mowing-machines and dentistry. This list does not teach us much. The prizes are, unless awarded with the most intelligent and conscientious precision, valuable chiefly as advertisements to the recipients, who can earn, and generally have earned, better advertisements in other shapes.
Thus have the chief powers of Western and Central Europe displayed their mettle in peaceful tourney. The visor of a young and unknown knight is now barred for the fray. He has, like the rest in these days of modern chivalry, to be his own herald and blow his own preliminary blast. It is a tolerably sonorous one. Let the event show that he speaks not through brass alone.
Thus we fared leisurely along. We passed Cabul merchants peddling their dried fruit on shaggy-haired camels; to these succeeded, in more lonesome portions of the road, small groups of Korkas, wretched remnants of one of the autochthonal families of Central India—even lower in the scale of civilization than the Gonds, among whom they are found; and to these the richly-caparisoned elephants of some wealthy Bhopal gentleman making a journey. We lingered long among the marvelous old Buddhistic topes or tumuli of Sanchi, and I interested my companion greatly in describing the mounds of the United States, with which I was familiar, and whose resemblance to these richly-sculptured and variously-ornamented ruins, though rude and far off, was quite enough to set his active fancy to evolving all manner of curious hypotheses going to explain such similarity. The whole way, by Sangor, Gharispore, Bhilsa, Sanchi, Sonori, presented us with the most interesting relics of the past, and the frequent recurrence of the works of the once prevalent Buddhistic faith continually incited us to new discussions of the yet unsolved question, Why has Buddha’s religion, which once had such entire possession of this people’s hearts, so entirely disappeared from the land?
And, as nothing could be more completely contrasted with the desert asceticism which Buddha’s tenets inculcated than the luxury into which Mohammed’s creed has flowered, so nothing could have more strikingly broken in upon our discussions of the Buddhistic monuments than the view which we at last obtained of the lovely Mohammedan city of Bhopal. To the south and east ran a strip of country as barren and heartacheish as if the very rocks and earth had turned Buddhist, beyond which a range of low rounded hills, not unlike topes, completed the ascetic suggestion. But, turning from this, we saw Mohammedanism at its very loveliest. Minarets, domes, palaces, gardens, the towers of the citadel, waters of lovely lakes, all mingled themselves together in the voluptuous light of the low sun: there was a sense of music, of things that sparkled, of pearly lustres, of shimmering jewels, of softness, of delight, of luxury. Bhopal looked over the ragged valley like a sultan from the window of his zenana regarding afar off an unkempt hermit in his solitude. My companion had arranged for permission to enter the town, and it was not long ere we were installed in the house of a friend of Bhima Gandharva’s, whose guests we remained during our stay in Bhopal.
[Illustration: MUSSULMAN WOMAN OF BHOPAL.]
On a rock at the summit of a hill commanding this interesting city stands the fort of Fatehgarh, built by a certain Afghan adventurer, Dost Mohammed Khan, who, in a time when this part of India must have been a perfect paradise for all the free lances of the East, was so fortunate as to win the favor of Aurungzebe, and to receive as evidence thereof a certain district in Malwa. The Afghan seems to have lost no time in improving the foothold thus gained, and he thus founded the modern district of Bhopal, which was formerly divided between Malwa and Gondwana, one gate of the town standing in the former and one in the latter country. Dost Mohammed Khan appears, indeed, to have been not the only adventurer who bettered his fortunes in Bhopal. It is a curious fact, and one well illustrating the liberality which has characterized much of the more modern history of the Bhopal government, that no long time ago it was administered by a regency consisting of three persons—one a Hindu, one a Mohammedan, and the other a Christian. This Christian is mentioned by Sir John Malcolm as “Shahzed Musseah, or Belthazzar Bourbona” (by which Sir John means Shahzahad Messiah—a native appellation signifying “the Christian prince”—or Balthazar of Bourbon), and is described by that officer, to whom he was well known, as a brave soldier and an able man. He traced his lineage to a certain Frenchman calling himself John of Bourbon, who in the time of Akbar was high in favor and position at Delhi. His widow, the princess Elizabeth of Bourbon, still resides at Bhopal in great state, being possessed of abundant wealth and ranking second only to the Begum. She is the acknowledged head of a large number of descendants of John of Bourbon, amounting to five or six hundred, who remain at Bhopal and preserve their faith—having a church and Catholic priest of their own—as well as the traditions of their ancestry, which, according to their claim, allies them to the royal blood of France.
No mention of Bhopal can fail to pay at least a hasty tribute in commemoration of the forcible character and liberal politics of the Begum, who has but of late gone to her account after a long and sometimes trying connection with the administration of her country’s affairs. After the death of her husband—who was accidentally killed by a pistol in the hands of a child not long after the treaty with the English in 1818—their nephew, then in his minority, was considered as the future nawab, and was betrothed to their daughter, the Begum being regent during his minority. When the time came, with his majority, for the nuptials, the Begum refused to allow the marriage to take place, for reasons which need not here be detailed. After much dispute a younger brother of the nephew was declared more eligible, but the Begum still managed in one way or another to postpone matters, much to his dissatisfaction. An arbitration finally resulted in placing him on the throne, but
The town proper of Bhopal is enclosed by a much—decayed wall of masonry some two miles in circuit, within which is a fort, similar both in its condition and material to the wall. Outside these limits is a large commercial quarter (gunge). The beautiful lake running off past the town to the south is said to be artificial in its origin, and to have been produced at the instance of Bho Pal, the minister of King Bohoje, as long ago as the sixth century, by damming up the waters of the Bess (or Besali) River, for the purpose of converting an arid section into fertile land. It is still called the Bhopal Tal.
[Illustration: A NAUTCH-GIRL (OR BAYADERE) OF ULWUR.]
If this were a ponderous folio of travels, one could detail the pleasures and polite attentions of one’s Bhopalese host; of the social utter-pan; of the sprinklings with rose-water; of the dreamy talks over fragrant hookahs; of the wanderings among bazaars filled with moving crowds of people hailing from all the ports that lie between Persia and the Gondwana; of the fetes where the nautch-girl of Baroda contended in graceful emulation with the nautch-girl of Ulwur, and the cathacks (or male dancers) with both; of elegantly-perfumed Bhopalese young men; of the palaces of nobles guarded by soldiers whose accoutrements ranged from the musket to the morion; of the Moharum, when the Mohammedan celebrates the New Year. But what would you have? A sketch is a sketch. We have got only to the heart of India: the head and the whole prodigious eastern side are not yet reached. It is time one were off for Jhansi.
At Bioura we encountered modern civilization again in the shape of the south-west branch of the Grand Trunk road, which leads off from the main stem at Agra. The Grand Trunk is not a railroad, but a firm and smooth highway, with which the English have united Calcutta to the North-west Provinces and to the west of India. Much of this great roadway is metaled with kunkur, an oolitic limestone found near the surface of the soil in Hindustan; and all Anglo-India laughed at the joke of an irreverent punster who, apropos of the fact that this application of kunkur to the road-bed was made under the orders of Lord William Bentinck, then governor-general, dubbed that gentleman William the Kunkurer.
We had abandoned our chapaya—which, we may add for the benefit of future travelers, we had greatly improved as against jolting by causing it to be suspended upon a pair of old springs which we found, a relic of some antique break-down, in a village on the route—and after a short journey on elephants were traveling dak; that is, by post. The dak-gharri is a comfortable-enough long carriage on four wheels, and constitutes the principal mode of conveyance for travelers in India besides the railway. It contains a mattress inside, for it goes night and day, and one’s baggage is strapped on top, much as in an American stage-coach after the “boot” is full. Frequent relays of horses along the route enable the driver to urge his animals from one station to the other with great speed, and the only other stoppages are at the dak-bungalows.
“I have discovered,” I said to Bhima Gandharva after a short experience of the dak-gharri and the dak-bungalows—“I have discovered a general remark about India which is not absurd: all the horses are devils and all the dak-bungalow servants are patriarchs.”
“If you judge by the heels of the former and the beards of the latter, it is true,” he said.
This little passage was based on the experience of the last relay, which was, however, little more than a repetition of many previous ones. My friend and I having arranged ourselves comfortably in the dak-gharri as soon as it was announced ready to start, the long and marvelously lean Indian who was our driver signified to his team by the usual horse-language that we should be glad to go. The horse did not even agitate his left ear—a phenomenon which I associate with a horse in that moment when he is quietly making up his mind to be fractious. “Go, my brother,” said the driver in a mellifluous and really fraternal tone of voice. The horse disdained to acknowledge the tie: he stood still.
[Illustration: A NAUTCHNI (OR BAYADERE) OF BARODA.]
Then the driver changed the relationship, with an access of tenderness in voice and in adjuration. “Go, my son,” he entreated. But the son stood as immovable as if he were going to remain a monument of filial impiety to all time.
“Go, my grandson, my love.” This seemed entirely too much for the animal, and produced apparently a sense of abasement in him which was in the highest degree uncomplimentary to his human kinsman and lover. He lay down. In so doing he broke several portions of the ragged harness, and then proceeded, with the most deliberate absurdity, to get himself thoroughly tangled in the remainder.
“I think I should be willing,” I said to my companion, “to carry that horse to Jhansi on my own shoulders if I could have the pleasure of seeing him blown from one of the rajah’s cannon in the, fort.”
But the driver, without the least appearance of discomposure, had dismounted, and with his long deft Hindu fingers soon released the animal, patched up his gear, replaced him between the shafts and resumed his place.
[Illustration: THE CATHACKS (OR DANCING MEN) OF BHOPAL.]
Another round of consanguinities: the animal still remained immovable, till presently he lunged out with a wicked kick which had nearly obliterated at one blow the whole line of his ancestry and collateral relatives as represented in the driver. At this the latter became as furious as he had before been patient: he belabored the horse, assistants ran from the stables, the whole party yelled and gesticulated at the little beast simultaneously, and he finally broke down the road at a pace which the driver did not suffer him to relax until we arrived at the bungalow where we intended to stop for supper.
A venerable old Mohammedan in a white beard that gave him the majesty of Moses advanced for the purpose of ascertaining our wants.
“Had he any mutton-chops?” asked Bhima Gandharva in Hindustani, the lingua franca of the country.
“Cherisher of the humble! no.”
“Any beefsteak?”
“Nourisher of the poor! no.”
“Well, then, I hear a chicken,” said my friend, conclusively.
“O great king,” said the Mohammedan, turning to me, “there is a chicken.”
In a twinkling the cook caught the chicken: its head was turned toward Mecca. Bismillah! O God the Compassionate, the Merciful! the poor fowl’s head flew off, and by the time we had made our ablutions supper was ready.
Turning across the ridges to the north-eastward from Sipri, we were soon making our way among the tanks and groves which lie about the walls of Jhansi. Here, as at Poona, there was ever present to me a sense of evil destinies, of blood, of treacheries, which seemed to linger about the trees and the tanks like exhalations from the old crimes which have stained the soil of the country. For Jhansi is in the Bundelcund, and the Bundelcund was born in great iniquity. The very name—which properly is Bundelakhand, or “the country of the Bundelas”—has a history thickly set about with the terrors of caste, of murder and of usurpation. Some five hundred years ago a certain Rajput prince, Hurdeo Sing, committed the unpardonable sin of marrying a slave (bundi), and was in consequence expelled from the Kshatriya caste to which he belonged. He fled with his disgrace into this region, and after some years found opportunity at least to salve his wounds with blood and power. The son of the king into whose land he had escaped conceived a passion for the daughter of the slave wife. It must needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which Hurdeo Sing exacted were of a nature to try the strongest love. These were, that the nuptial banquet should be prepared by the unmentionable hands of the slave wife herself, and that the king and his court should partake of it—a proceeding which would involve the loss of their caste also. But the prince loved, and his love must have lent him extraordinary eloquence, for he prevailed on his
One does not wonder that the hills and forests of such a land became the hiding-places of the strangling Thugs, the home of the poisoning Dacoits, the refuge of conspirators and insurgents and the terror of Central India.
As for Jhansi, the district in whose capital we were now sojourning, its people must have tasted many of the sorrows of anarchy and of despotism even in recent times. It was appurtenant no long time ago to the Bundela rajah of Ourcha: from him it passed by conquest into the possession of the Peishwa. These small districts were all too handy for being tossed over as presents to favorites: one finds them falling about among the greedy subordinates of conquerors like nuts thrown out to school-boys. The Peishwa gave Jhansi to a soubahdar: the British government then appeared, and effected an arrangement by which the soubahdar should retain it as hereditary rajah on the annual payment of twenty-four thousand rupees. This so-called rajah, Ramchund Rao, died without issue in 1835. Amid great disputes as to the succession the British arbitrators finally decided in favor of Rugonath Rao; but new quarrels straightway arose, a great cry being made that Rugonath Rao was a leper, and that a leper ought not to be a rajah. His death in some three years settled that difficulty, only to open fresh ones among the conflicting claimants. These perplexing questions the British finally concluded quite effectually by assuming charge of the government themselves, though this was attended with trouble, for the stout old mother of Ramchund Rao made armed resistance from the fort or castellated residence of the rajahs, which stands on its great rock overlooking the town of Jhansi. A commission finally decreed the succession to Baba Gunghadar Rao, but retained the substantial power until the revenues had recovered from the depression consequent upon these anarchic disturbances.
[Illustration: BURIAL PLACE OF THE RAJAHS OF JHANSI.]
“At any rate,” I said as Bhima Gandharva finished this narrative while we were walking about the burial-place of the rajahs of Jhansi, and occupying ourselves with tracing the curious admixture of Moslem with Hindu architecture presented by the tombs, “these rajahs, if they loved each other but little in life, appear to have buried each other with proper enough observances: the cenotaphs are worthy of tenderer remembrances.”
“Yes,” he said: “this part of India is everywhere a land of beautiful tombs which enclose ugly memories. I recall one tomb, however, near which I have spent many hours of tranquil meditation, and which is at once lovely without and within: it is the tomb of the Muslim saint Allum Sayed at Baroda. It was built of stones taken from an old Jain temple whose ruins are still visible near by; and with a singular fitness, in view of its material, the Muslim architect has mingled his own style with the Hindu, so that an elegant union of the keen and naked Jain asceticism with the mellower and richer fancy of the luxurious Mohammedan has resulted in a perfect work of that art which makes death lovely by recalling its spiritual significance. Besides, a holy silence broods about the cactus and the euphorbian foliage, so that a word will send the paroquets, accustomed to such unbroken stillness, into hasty flights. The tomb proper is in the chamber at the centre, enclosed by delicately-trellised walls of stone. I can easily fancy that the soul of Allum Sayed is sitting by his grave, like a faithful dog loath to quit his dead master.
[Illustration: TOMB OF ALLUM SAYED.]
Jhansi was once in the enjoyment of a considerable trade. The caravans from the Deccan to Furruckabad and other places in the Douab were in the habit of stopping here, and there was much trafficking in the cloths of Chanderi and in bows, arrows and spears—the weapons of the Bundela tribes—which were here manufactured. Remnants of the wealth then acquired remain; and on the evening of the same day when we were wandering among the rajahs’ tombs we proceeded to the house of a rich friend of Bhima Gandharva’s, where we were to witness a nautch, or dance, executed by a wandering troop of Mewati bayaderes. We arrived about nine o’clock: a servant sprinkled us with rose-water, and we were ushered into a large saloon, where the bayaderes were seated with a couple of musicians, one of whom played the tam-tam and another a sort of violin. When the family of our host, together with a few friends, were seated at the end of the room opposite the bayaderes, the signal was given, and the music commenced with a soft and indescribably languorous air. One of the bayaderes rose with a lithe and supple movement of the body not comparable to anything save the slow separating of a white scud from the main cloud which one sees on a summer’s day high up in the cirrus regions. She was attired in a short jacket, a scarf, and a profusion of floating stuff that seemed at once to hide and expose. Presently I observed that her jewelry was glittering as it does not glitter when one is still, yet her feet were not moving. I also heard a gentle tinkling from her anklets and bracelets. On regarding her more steadily, I saw that her whole body was trembling in gentle and yet seemingly intense vibrations, and she maintained this singular agitation while she assumed an attitude of
[Illustration: MEWATI DANCING-GIRL.]
Her performance being finished, the bayadere was succeeded by others, each of whom appeared to have her specialty—one imitating by her postures a serpent-charmer; another quite unequivocally representing a man-charmer; another rapidly executing what seemed an interminable pirouette. Finally, all joined in a song and a closing round, adding the sound of clapping hands to the more energetic measures of the music.
“I can now understand,” I said when the nautch was finished, “the remark of the shah of Persia which set everybody laughing not long ago in England. During his visit to that country, being present at a ball where ladies and gentlemen were enjoying themselves in a somewhat laborious way in dancing, he finally asked, ’Why do you not make your servants do this for you?’ It is at least entertaining to see a nautch, but to wade through the English interpretation of a waltz, hic labor hoc opus est, and the servants ought to perform it.”
“Do you know,” said Bhima Gandharva, “that much the same national mode of thought which prompts the Hindu to have his dancing done by the nautch-girls also prompts him to have his tax-gathering and general governing done by the English? We are often asked why the spectacle has so often been seen of our native princes quietly yielding up their kingdoms to strangers, and even why we do not now rise and expel the foreigner from power over us. The truth is, most Hindus are only glad to get some one else to do the very hard work of governing. The Englishman is always glad to get a French cook, because the French can cook better than the English. Why should not we be also glad to get English governors, when the English govern so much better than the Hindus? In truth, governing and cooking are very like—the successful ruler, like the successful cook, has only to consult the tastes of his employers; and upon any proper theory of politics government becomes just as purely an economic business as cooking. You do not cook your own dinner: why? Because you desire to devote your time to something better
The next day we fared northward toward Agra, by Duttiah, Gwalior and Dholepore. Learning at Agra that the northward-bound train—for here we had come upon complete civilization again in the East Indian Railway—would pass in an hour, we determined to reserve the Taj Mahal (the lovely Pearl Mosque of Agra) until we should be returning from Delhi to Calcutta. Bhima Gandharva desired me, however, to see the Douab country and the old sacred city of Mattra; and so when we had reached Hatras Station, a few miles north of Agra, we abandoned the railway and struck across to the south-westward, toward Mattra, in a hired carriage.
We were now veritably in ancient Hindustan. It was among these level plains through which we were rolling that the antique Brahmins came and propounded that marvelous system which afterward took the whole heart of the land. Nothing could have been more striking than to cast one’s eye thus over the wide cotton-fields—for one associates cotton with the New—and find them cultivated by these bare-legged and breech-clouted peasants of the Douab, with ploughs which consisted substantially of a crooked stick shod with iron at the end, and with other such farming-implements out of the time that one thinks of as forty centuries back. Yet in spite of this primitive rudeness of culture, and of an aridity of soil necessitating troublesome irrigation, these plains have for a prodigious period of time supported a teeming population; and I could not help crying out to Bhima Gandharva that if we had a few millions of these gentle and patient peasants among the cotton-fields of the United States, the South would quickly become a Garden of Delight and the planters could build Jammah Masjids with rupees for marble.
[Illustration: PEASANTS OF THE DOUAB.]
The conservatism which has preserved for so long a time the ancient rude methods of industry begins to grow on one as one passes between these villages of people who seem to be living as if they were perfectly sure that God never intended them to live any other way.
“It is not long,” said my friend, “since a British officer of engineers, on some expedition or other, was encamped for the night at no great distance from here. His tent had been pitched near one of those Persian water-wheels such as you have seen, which, although of great antiquity, are perhaps as ingeniously adapted to the purpose of lifting water as any machine ever invented. The creaking of the wheel annoyed him very much, and after a restless night, owing to that cause, he rose and went out of his tent and inquired of the proprietor of the wheel (a native) why in the name of Heaven he never greased it. ‘Because,’ said the conservative Hindu, ’I have become so accustomed to the noise that I can only sleep soundly while it is going on: when it stops, then I wake, and knowing from the cessation of the sound that my bullock-driver is neglecting his duty, I go out and beat him.’ Thus, even the conservation of the useless comes in time to create habits which are useful.”
“It is true,” I replied, “and it recalls to me a somewhat unusual illustration. A summer or two ago a legal friend of mine, who is the possessor of a large family of children, came into the court-room one morning with very red eyes, and to my inquiry concerning the cause of the same he replied: ’To tell you the truth, I can’t go to sleep unless a child is crying about the house somewhere; but my wife left town yesterday for the summer with all the children, and I haven’t had a wink the whole night.’”
A drive of some five hours brought us to Mattra after dark, and as we crossed the bridge of boats over the sacred Jumna (the Yamuna of the Sanscrit poems) he seemed indeed thrice holy, with his bosom full of stars. Mattra, which lies immediately on the western bank of the river, stands next to Benares among the holy cities of the Hindus: here both the soil and the river-water are consecrated, for this was the birthplace of Krishna, or, more properly speaking, the scene of that avatar of Vishnu which is known as Krishna. When we rose early in the morning and repaired to the river-bank, hundreds of the faithful were ascending and descending the numerous ghats leading down the high bank to the water, while a still more animated crowd of both sexes were standing up to their middle in the stream, throwing the water in this direction and that, and mingling their personal ablutions with the rites of worship in such a way as might at once clean both souls and bodies. Evidences of the holy character of the town met us everywhere as we strolled back to our lodgings. Sacred monkeys, painted red over their hind quarters in consecration to the monkey-god Hanuman, capered and grinned about us, and sacred bulls obstructed our way along the narrow and dirty streets, while everywhere we saw pictures representing Krishna—sometimes much like an Apollo in the guise of a youthful shepherd playing the flute to a group of young girls, who danced under a tree; sometimes as a Hercules strangling a serpent or performing other feats of physical strength.
Fabulous stories are told of the early wealth and glory of Mattra. Ferishta relates that when Mahmoud of Ghazni had arrived with his troops in the neighborhood in the year 1017, he heard of this rich city consecrated to Krishna Vasu-Deva, and straightway marching upon it captured it and gave it up to plunder. Writing of it afterward to the governor of Ghazni, he declared that such another city could not be built within two centuries; that it contained one thousand edifices “as firm as the faith of the faithful,” and mostly built of marble; that among the temples had been found five golden idols in whose heads were ruby eyes worth fifty thousand dinars; that in another was a sapphire weighing four hundred miskals (the present miskal of Bosrah is seventy-two grains), the image itself producing, after being melted, ninety-eight thousand three hundred miskals of pure gold; and that besides these there were captured one hundred silver idols, each of which was a camel’s load.
We spent a pleasant morning in wandering about the old ruined fort which was built here by Jey Singh (or Jaya Sinha), the famous astronomer, and we were particularly attracted, each in his own contemplative and quiet way, by the ruins of an observatory which we found on the roof of one of the buildings, where the remains of old dials, horizontal circles and mural instruments lay scattered about. I think the only remark made by either of us was when Bhima Gandharva declared in a voice of much earnestness, from behind a broken gnomon where he had ensconced himself, that he saw Time lying yonder on his back, with his head on a broken dial, nearly asleep.
[Illustration: HINDU BANKERS OF DELHI.]
Returning to Hatras Station on the same day, we again took the train, and this time did not leave it until we had crossed the great tubular bridge over the Jumna and come to a standstill in the station at Delhi. Here we found one of the apparently innumerable friends of Bhima Gandharva, a banker of Delhi, awaiting us with a carriage, and we were quickly driven to his residence—a circumstance, by the way, which I discovered next day to be a legitimate matter of felicitation to myself, for there is, strange to say, no hotel in Delhi for Europeans, travelers being dependent upon the accommodations of a dak-bungalow, where one is lodged for a rupee a day.
In the morning we made an early start for the palace of the padishahs, which stands near the river, and indeed may be said to constitute the eastern portion of the city, having a wall of a mile in extent on its three sides, while the other abuts along the offset of the Jumna upon which Delhi is built. Passing under a splendid Gothic arch in the centre of a tower, then along a vaulted aisle in the centre of which was an octagonal court of stone, the whole route being adorned with flowers carved in stone and inscriptions from the Koran, we finally gained the court of the
Yet what a sense of utter reverse of fortune comes upon one after the first shock of the beauty of these delicate stone fantasies! Wherever we went—in the Dewani Aum or hall of audience; in the Akbari Hammun or imperial baths; in the Sammam Burj or private palace of the padishahs, that famous and beautiful palace over whose gate the well-known inscription stands, “If there is a Paradise on earth, it is here;” in the court, in the garden—everywhere was abandonment, everywhere the filthy occupations of birds, everywhere dirt, decay, desolation.
It was therefore a prodigious change when, emerging from the main gate of the palace, we found ourselves in the great thoroughfare of Delhi, the Chandni Chowk (literally “Shining street"), which runs straight to the Lahore gate of the city. Here an immense number of daily affairs were transacting themselves, and the Present eagerly jostled the Past out of the road. The shops were of a size which would have seemed very absurd to an enterprising American tradesman, and those dealing in the same commodities appeared to be mostly situated together—here the shoemakers, there the bankers, and so on.
The gold-embroidered cloths—Delhi is famous for them—made me think of those embroidered in stone which we had just seen in the Dewani Khas. These people seem to dream in curves and flowing lines, as the German dreams in chords and meandering tones, the Italian in colors and ripe forms.
("And as the American—?” said Bhima Gandharva with a little smile as we were walking down the Chandni Chowk.
“The American does not dream—yet,” I answered.)
[Illustration: THE GRAND HALL OF THE DEWANI KHAS IN THE PALACE OF DELHI.]
We saw much of the embroidered fabrics known as “kincob” (properly, kunkhwab) and “kalabatu;” and Bhima Gandharva led me into an inner apartment where a nakad was manufacturing the gold thread (called kalabatoon) for these curious loom embroideries. The kalabatoon consists of gold wire wound about a silk thread; and nothing could better illustrate the deftness of the Hindu fingers than the motions of the workman whom we saw.
We stopped at the office of our banker for a moment on our way along the Chandni Chowk in order to effect some changes of money. As we were leaving, Bhima Gandharva inquired if I had observed the young man in the red cotton turban who had politely broken off in our favor a long negotiation with our banker, which he resumed when we had finished our little business.
“Of course I did,” I replied. “What a beautiful young man he was! His aquiline nose, his fair complexion, his brilliant eyes, his lithe form, his intelligent and vivacious expression,—all these irresistibly attracted me to him.”
“Ha!” said Bhima Gandharva, as if he were clearing his throat. He grasped my arm: “Come, I thought I saw the young man’s father standing near the door as we passed out. I wonder if he will irresistibly attract you?” He made me retrace my steps to the banker’s office: “There he is.”
He was the image of the son in feature, yet his face was as repulsive as his son’s was beautiful: the Devil after the fall, compared with the angel he was before it, would have presented just such a contrast.
“They are two Vallabhacharyas,” said my companion as we walked away. “You know that the trading community of India, comprehended under the general term of Baniahs, is divided into numerous castes, which transmit their avocations from father to son and preserve themselves free from intermixture with others. The two men you saw are probably on some important business negotiation connected with Bombay or the west of India; for they are Bhattias, who are also followers of the most singular religion the world has ever known—that of the Vallabhacharya or Maharaja sect. These are Epicureans who have quite exceeded, as well in their formal creeds as in their actual practices, the wildest dreams of any of those mortals who have endeavored to make a religion of luxury. They are called Vallabhacharyas, from Vallabha, the name of their founder, who dates from 1479, and acharya, a “leader.” Their Pushti Marga, or eat-and-drink doctrine, is briefly this: In the centre of heaven (Gouloka) sits Krishna, of the complexion of a dark cloud, clad in yellow, covered with unspeakable jewels, holding a flute. He is accompanied by Roaha, his wife, and also by three hundred millions of Gopis, or female
[Illustration: THE JAMMAH MASJID AT DELHI.]
On the next day we visited the Jammah Masjid, the “Great Mosque” of Shah Jehan the renowned, and the glory of Delhi. Ascending the flight of steps leading to the principal entrance, we passed under the lofty arch of the gateway and found ourselves in a great court four hundred and fifty feet square, paved with red stone, in the centre of which a large basin supplied by several fountains contained the water for ceremonial ablutions. On three sides ran light and graceful arcades, while the fourth was quite enclosed by the mass of the mosque proper. Crossing the court and ascending another magnificent flight of stone steps, our eyes were soon commanding the facade of the great structure, and reveling in those prodigious contrasts of forms and colors which it presents. No building could, for this very reason, suffer more from that lack of simultaneity which is involved in any description by words; for it is the vivid shock of seeing, in one stroke of the eye, these three ripe and luxuriant domes (each of which at the same time offers its own subsidiary opposition of white and black stripes), relieved by the keen heights of the two flanking minarets,—it is this, together with the noble admixtures of reds, whites and blacks in the stones, crowned by the shining of the gilded minaret-shafts, which fills the eye of the beholder with a large content of beautiful form and color.
As one’s eye becomes cooler one begins to distinguish in the front, which is faced with slabs of pure white marble, the divisions adorned by inscriptions from the Koran inlaid in letters of black marble, and the singularly airy little pavilions which crown the minarets. We ascended one of the minarets by a winding staircase of one hundred and thirty steps, and here, while our gaze took flight over Delhi and beyond, traversing in a second the achievements of many centuries and races, Bhima Gandharva told me of the glories of old Delhi. Indranechta—as Delhi appears in the fabulous legends of old India, and as it is still called by the Hindus—dates its own birth as far back as three thousand years before our era. It was fifty-seven years before the time of Christ that the name of Delhi began to appear in history. Its successive destructions (which a sketch like this cannot even name) left enormous quantities of ruins, and as its successive rebuildings were accomplished by the side of (not upon) these remains, the result has been that from the garden of Shahlimar, the site of which is on the north-west of the town, to beyond the Kantab Minar, whose tall column I could plainly distinguish rising up nine miles off to the south-west, the plain of Delhi presents an accumulation and variety of ruins not to be surpassed in the whole world.
With their enthusiasm fairly kindled for the work which the government carries on in the signal-service department of the little house on the beach,[A] our exploring party descended the narrow ladder and found themselves in a ten-by-twelve room, warmed by a stove and surrounded by benches. It is used, the old captain who has volunteered as guide tells us, by the men on the life-saving service during the nine months in which they are on duty. A cheerful fire was burning in the stove, and we gathered about it: the wind blew a stronger gale each moment outside, barring out the far sea-horizon with a wall of gray mist. The tide rolled up on the shelving beach beneath the square window with a sullen, treacherous roar.
“It’s the bar that gives the sea that sound,” said the captain. “This is the ugliest bit of coast for vessels from Nova Scotia to Florida. It’s like this,” drawing his finger across the table in the vain effort to map out the matter intelligibly to a landsman’s comprehension. “Here’s the Jersey coast. You’ve got to hug it close with your vessel to make New York harbor—there; and all along it, from Sandy Hook to Cape May, runs the bar—so. Broken, but so much the worse. A nor’-easter drives you on it, sure. I’ve known from sixteen to twenty wracks in a winter on this coast before the companies or government took up the matter.”
[Footnote A: See the article entitled “The House on the Beach,” in Lippincott’s Magazine for January. Since the publication of that paper a letter of distinction has been received by General Albert J. Myer from the International Congress of Geographical Sciences, held in Paris in 1875, which states that the United States signal service appeared to the Congress to deserve an exceptional reward. “This service, so remarkably organized, has been the cause of such progress in meteorological science that the distinctions provided by the regulations of the Congress would not be commensurate for it.” The letter of distinction was therefore sent as the highest award decreed by the Congress.]
“That only argued bad seamanship,” said one of his listeners. “When every ship’s captain knew the bar—”
“That’s precisely what they didn’t know. It alters with every year; and on a dark night, with a driving sea and wind both against you, there’s small chance of clearing it. However, I don’t mean to say that all of them vessels were wracked fair and square. It got to be customary with owners of wornout coast-schooners to send them out with light cargoes and run them on the Jersey bar. The captain and crew would time it so’s they could get ashore, and the sea would soon break up the vessel, and then up they goes to York for insurance on ship and cargo. There was a good deal of that sort of work went on when I was a boy, until the underwriters got wind of it and established the wracking system.”
“This building?—”
“No, no! Don’t confound the two things. This is government work altogether, and maintained solely for the saving of life. The crew of the lifeboat here are not allowed to touch a pound of freight or baggage on a wracked ship. The wracking-masters were appointed and paid by the board of underwriters in New York. Old Captain Brown was general agent on this beach. They took the coast in charge, as you might say, long before this government service was started. It was managed—like this,” resorting again to his finger and the imaginary lines on the table. “A vessel came ashore on the bar. The first man who saw it gave warning to the wracking-master, who took command of the men ashore and the cargo in behalf of the insurance companies.”
“Were there any signals then to rouse the coast in case of wreck?”
“Lord save you! no: every man warned his neighbor. There weren’t but a few scattered folks along the coast then, but in time of a wrack you’d see them in the dead of night ready and waiting along the beach. No need of your signal-flags for them, I reckon. They knew there’d be dead men and plenty of wrack coming ashore before morning.”
“And every man was ready to go out in his boat?” cried an enthusiastic townsman, “or to carry a line to the sinking ship?”
“Well—hardly,” said the captain with a dry smile. “Folks that know the water don’t go exactly that way to work. There was regular wracking-boats, built for the surf, and crews for each, you see: best man in the starn. The man in the starn, he generally owned the boat and chose his crew. Picked men. He kept them year after year. Then the wracking-masters hired him, his boat and his crew. Best crew chosen first, of course. Two dollars a day each was reckoned good pay. They got famous names, some of them surfboat crews,” reflectively. “There was William Chadwick—Bill Shattuck he goes by—his crew was known from Sandy Hook to Hatteras. There’s one of them now: he can tell you about it better than me.—Hello, Jake!”
We looked out of the window and saw the fisherman whom we had met in the afternoon lazily drawing his slow length along the beach, two or three blue mackerel dangling from his hand: he had not enough of energy, apparently, to hold them up. This was the fellow whom, an hour before, we had pitied as a dull soul to whom the wreck was “timber” and the life-saving station a “shed.” We all had a vague ideal before us of a gallant sailor, with eyes of fire and nerves of steel, plunging into the cruel surf to rescue the sinking ship. We accepted the slouching Jacob instead with disrelish. He was not the stuff of which heroes in books are made.
“Jake,” said the captain, “where is Shattuck’s boat now? I was speaking of it to the gentlemen here.”
“Take a cigar,” interpolated one of the party.
Jacob took a cigar, bit off the end and dropped easily into a seat: “Bill’s boat? Well, it’s drawed up ashore at the head of Barnegat—down there. You kin see it out of the window ef you like.”
“There is very seldom any call for the surf-boats and crews in summer,” explained the captain. “The men follow fishing usually. But in winter they’re always ready if a ship comes on the bar.”
“Your crew has done good service in saving life, I hear, Jacob?” said one of the strangers.
“Well, I dunno. We’re generally the first called on by the wracking-master. Sure of the best pay. There’s Shattuck and Curtis and Van Note and George Johnson, and Fleming in the starn,” checking them off with his fingers—“all good men to bring off trade in a heavy pull.”
“You don’t mean that these surf boat crews are paid to save the cargo, and that human life is left to the care of the government?” cried a listener indignantly.
“The government undertakes the life-saving service, and we’re paid by the wracking-master, certainly,” said Jacob calmly. “To save the cargo. But the human bein’s is took out first. Of course. As you say. It’s not likely any man’s a-goin’ to bring trade out of a wrack’s long’s there’s a live critter aboard.”
“There’s not one of these men,” said the captain with a little heat in his tone, “who has not saved many a life at the risk of his own. Isn’t that true, Jacob?”
“I dunno. We jist work ahead at what’s got to be done. I know Van Note saved my life. The way of it was this. It was the time the Clara Brookman went down: you mind the Clara Brookman, cap’n? She was homeward bound after a long cruise—three year—and she struck the bar just below, a mile or two. It was a swashin’ sea an’ a black night. Our surfboat was overturned with thirteen aboard: ’leven of us was picked up by the other boat. The men, they stood in the starn an’ hauled us aboard by main force—lifted us clear out of the water. Van Note’s a tremendous musc’lar fellar, he is. He caught me by the wrist jest as I was goin’ down for the last time: I’m not a small fish, either,” slapping his brawny thigh. “Yes, sir. Van Note and I never mixed much together afore or sence. But he did that for me: I don’t deny it.”
“You remember some terrible scenes of suffering no doubt, Jacob?”
“Well, I’ve seen vessels pretty well smashed up, sir. There was the Alabama, coast-schooner: all the crew went down on her in full sight; and the Annandale: she was a coal-brig, and she run aground on a December night. It was a terrible storm: but one surfboat got out to her. They took off what they could—the women and part of the crew. I was a boy then, and I mind seein’ them come ashore, their beards and clothes frozen stiff. After the boat left, some of the crew jumped into the sea, but they couldn’t live in it two minutes. It was nigh dawn when the boat got out to the brig agen, and there wasn’t a livin’ soul aboard of her; only the body of the mate lashed tight to the mainmast, a solid mass of ice. He couldn’t be got down, and I’ve heerd my father say it was awful to see him, with one hand held out as if p’intin’ to shore, rockin’ to and fro there overhead till the brig went under. Months after, some of the bodies of the crew was thrown up by the tide; they was as fresh as if they’d jest gone to sleep.”
“How could that be? Where had they been?”
“Sucked into the sand. Them heavy nothe-easters always throws up a bar, an’ they was sucked under it. When the bar give way the tide threw them up. But as soon as the air tetched them they began to moulder.”
There was a short silence. The evening was gathering fast, cold and threatening, the little fire threw our shadows high up on the wall, and the wail of the wind and thunder of the incoming tide gave a ghastly significance to this matter-of-fact catalogue of horrors. As we looked through the little window at the vast gray plain of water, it seemed as if every wave covered a wreck or dead men’s bones.
“Now, George Johnson,” continued Jacob, “he was the first man as saw the John Minturn come ashore. That was the worst storm I ever seen on this coast.—You mind it, cap’n?”
The captain nodded gravely: “February 15, 1846. It was the night old Phoebe Hall died, and I was sitting with the body when I heerd the guns fired from the Minturn,” he remarked.—“But go on, Jacob,” waving his pipe.
“The current was a-settin’ south. Sech a tide hadn’t been knowd sence the oldest men could remember: the sea broke over all the mashes clear up to the farm-houses. Well, sir, I was but a lad, but I couldn’t sleep: seemed as ef I ought to be a doin’ something, I didn’t rightly know what. About three o’clock in the morning I heerd a gun, and in a minute another, ‘Mother,’ I says, ‘there’s a vessel on the bar.’ So, as I gets on my clothes, she makes me a mug of hot coffee. ’You must drink this, Jacob, an’ eat some’at,’ she says, ‘before you go out.’ So to quiet her I takes the mug, but I hadn’t half drunk it when I hears shouting outside. It was one of the Shattucks: he says, ’There’s a ship come ashore up by Barnegat’ I says, ‘No,’ I says: ’the guns are from off the inlet.’ So I runs one way, and Shattuck the other. The night was dark as pitch, and the storm drivin’ like hell. And we was both right, for there was two vessels—a coast-schooner down by Squan, where I goes, and this big ship, the John Minturn, just here,” pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the beach outside and bar beyond.
“Were there many lives lost?”
“Over three hundred—all but fourteen. They come ashore tied on to boards or hencoops or the like—seven of the crew and seven passengers. We tried to launch the surfboat, but the boat was never built that could live on that sea. She was bound from New Orleans to New York, and the most of her passengers were wealthy people, going to the North for the winter. At least, so we jedged from her papers and the bodies and clothes of them that come ashore—some pretty little children, I mind, babies and their black nurses, and their mothers—delicate women with valooable rings on their hands. Some of them’s buried in the graveyard in the village, and their friends took some away.”
“There was the Minerva, too,” said the captain as Jacob paused to light his cigar again. “I forgit how many emigrants went down on that ship, but I remember picking up on the beach next day a clay pipe, with a stem nigh a yard long, not even chipped. It seemed curious that a useless thing like that should be washed safe ashore and hundreds of human lives be lost. And there was the New Era—went down near Deal: three hundred emigrants drowned. The captain had nailed down the hatches on them. Oh, that’s generally done,” he added, seeing the look of horror on our faces: “in a storm the steerage can’t be managed otherwise.”
“I remember,” said one of the listeners, “an incident which occurred when I was in China about ten years ago. Five hundred Chinese soldiers were being taken across the Inland Sea to quell an insurrection: when off Hoang-Ho the ship sprung a leak. The boats could only give a chance of escape to about eighty. The troops were all ordered on deck, while a detachment was selected to fill the boats. The rest remained immovable, standing under arms without a word, until the ship went down.”
Somebody reminded him of the story of the Birkenhead, which sank within four miles of the English coast with a regiment aboard that was coming home after five years’ absence in India. They too stood in solid rank on deck, their homes almost in sight, while the women and children were taken off and the ship slowly sank, the officers, with swords drawn, presenting arms to Death.
“Discipline! discipline!” said the captain. “But one wouldn’t have looked for it in them heathen Chinees.”
Duty! duty! we thought, and were quite sure heathenism had never interfered with that kind of heroism.
“Now, the usual run of American sailors,” said Jacob, who felt by this time that his final verdict was needed, wouldn’t have done that. Passengers is easier managed in time of a storm than sailors, especially them of coast-ships. Passengers is like sheep: they’re so skeert they’ll do what you bids ’em; but the sailors broach the liquor first thing. I’d rather manage so many pigs than sailors when they get holt of the grog. There was the City of New York. When she went down the mate stood with a club in his hand to keep the crew off the Scotch ale which was part of the freight. Well; sir, they got it, and thar they stayed, drinkin’, till the vessel parted amidships: couldn’t be got off no-how. There was three hundred passengers landed from that ship. We used the apparatus for her: government had taken hold of the matter then.”
“Before we say anything about the government service, one question about the Jersey wreckers. They bear a bad name. The story goes that the Barnegat pirates in old times drew vessels ashore by false lights, and plundered the shipwrecked people. How about that, Jacob? Honestly, now!”
“Well, sir, them stories is onjust. Them men as is called Barnegat pirates are not us fishermen—never were: they’re from the main—colliers and sech—as come down to a wrack, and they will have something to kerry home when they’re kept up all night. They do their share of stealin’, I’ll confess; but from Sandy Hook to Cape May it’s innocent to what is done on Long Island. It’s the stevedores and rigger-men on Long Island—reg’lar New York roughs. No man or woman was ever robbed on this beach till they was dead. Of course I don’t mean their trunks and sech, but not the body. The Long Islanders cut off the fingers of livin’ people for rings, but the Barnegat men never touch the body till it’s dead. No, sir.”
“And you understand,” interposed the captain eagerly, “these Barnegat robbers are a very different class from Jacob and the crews of surf boats?”
“Certainly. We understand the noble work which these wrecking-crews have done.—By the way, how do they choose their captain, Jacob—the man in the stern, as you call him? The most brave, heroic fellow, I suppose?”
“I dunno about that,” with a perplexed air. “We don’t calcoolate much on heroism and sech: we choose the man that’s got the best judgment of the sea—a keerful, firm man. These six men hes got to obey him—hes got to put their lives altogether in his hand, you see. They don’t want a headlong fellow: they want a man that knows the water—thorough.”
“Besides,” added the captain, “it is as with any other business—the best crew is surest of employment and pay. Each owner of a wracking-boat chooses his men for their muscle and skill: and the wracking-master chooses the best boat and crew. There’s competition, competition. On the contrary, the life-saving service, like all other government work, for a good many years fell into the hands of politicians: the superintendent was chosen because he had given some help to his party, and he appointed his own friends as lifeboat-men, often tavern loafers like himself. A harness-maker from Bricksburg held the place of master of the station below here for years—a man who probably never was in a boat, and certainly would not go in one in a heavy sea.”
“One would hardly expect to find fishermen in this solitary corner of the world struggling for political preferment on the seats of a lifeboat,” laughed one of the party.
But the captain could see no joke in it: “Well, sir, it’s a fact that it was done. And the consequence was, the people’s money was thrown away, and hundreds of human beings was left to perish within sight of land. If the administration—”
But while the captain and his companions labor over the well-trodden road thus opened, we will look into the work done in the house on the beach with the help of authorities more accurate than himself and Jacob.
Oddly enough, the first effort anywhere to stop the enormous loss of human life by shipwreck was made by that most selfish of rulers, George IV., and the first lifeboat was built by a London coachmaker, Lukin, who, it is said, had never seen the sea. After that other models of lifeboats were produced in England, none of which proved satisfactory until in 1850 the duke of Northumberland offered one hundred guineas as a prize for the best model, which was gained by James Beeching. A modification of his boat is now used by the National Lifeboat Institution, to which the entire care of the English life-saving service is committed. There is probably no object on which the British nation has more zealously expended sentiment, enthusiasm and money than this service, yet despite its grand record of work done there can be no doubt that it has been grossly mismanaged, and is ineffective to cope with the actual need. The roll of the National Lifeboat Institution numbers names of the most noble, humane and wealthy men and women in Great Britain; the queen is its patron; its resources are amply sufficient; no pains have been spared to secure the most scientific and perfect appliances. The whole work is made, in a degree, a matter of sentiment—exalted and humane sentiment, but, like all other emotional service, apt to be gusty and at times unpractical. The man who saves human life is rewarded with silver or gold medals: the individual lifeboats are themes of essays and song, and when one wears out a tablet is raised with the record of its services.
Our own life-saving service is founded on wholly different principles. It dates from 1848, when Hon. William Newell of New Jersey (incited probably by the recent terrible loss of the John Minturn, of which the captain told us) brought before Congress the frightful dangers of the coast of that State, and procured an appropriation of ten thousand dollars for “providing surf boats, carronades, etc. for the better protection of life and property from shipwreck on the coast between Sandy Hook and Little Egg Harbor.” The next session a similar appropriation was obtained. Small houses were built and furnished, but no persons were paid or authorized to take charge of them, and the business was managed in the well-meaning but slipshod English fashion. In 1854 the wreck of the Powhatan on Squan Beach and the loss of three hundred lives produced a storm of public indignation which aroused Congress, and twenty thousand dollars were appropriated for lifeboats, etc. for the coast of New Jersey, and a similar sum for the ocean side of Long Island. A superintendent was appointed for each coast and a keeper for each of the houses, but for sixteen years no regular crews were employed. It was during this period, too, that the petty offices of superintendent
In 1871, S.I. Kimball, to whom the Revenue Marine Bureau was then given in charge, proceeded to completely reorganize the service. New houses were built or the old ones repaired and enlarged; competent men were appointed as keepers, and strict orders given as to the selection of experienced and skillful surfmen as crews; the houses were thoroughly furnished with every appliance requisite in time of disaster, for which the keeper is held responsible. The average distance between the stations is three miles. Immediate proof of the efficacy of the improvements in the service was given, as in the twenty-two wrecks occurring that season on the Long Island and New Jersey coasts not a single life was lost. In a word, Mr. Kimball began successfully the seemingly hopeless task of converting the dirty, ruinous station-houses and their lazy, disorderly keepers and crews, scattered along the coast, to the order, discipline and efficiency of forts and drilled soldiers, and the result proved that order and discipline, when evolved out of the worst materials, can grapple with and conquer even the sea. In 1873 the seventy-one station-houses were increased to eighty-one, the line having been extended along the coasts of Cape Cod and Rhode Island. Congress having appropriated one hundred thousand dollars for the establishment of new stations, twenty-three were contracted for, giving the Maine coast five; New Hampshire, one; Massachusetts, five; Virginia, two; North Carolina, ten. The connection between the life-saving and storm-signal service was effected at several stations, thus supplying telegraphic communication between the department and the coast outposts. This, probably, was the most marked advance made by the service: it was the nerve-line which brought the working members under control of an intelligent head. In thirty-two wrecks occurring during the year on the coasts where stations were established but one life had been lost.
The unprecedented success of the service to this point justified its demand for larger means and fuller powers. In the last session of the Forty-second Congress a bill was introduced by Hon. John Lynch of Maine to provide for the establishment of additional stations on the North Atlantic seaboard, and directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report the points on the entire sea and lake coasts at which stations would best subserve the interests of humanity and commerce, with estimates of the cost. This bill passed, and was approved March 3, 1873. The commission appointed consisted of Mr. Kimball, Captain John Faunce and Captain J.H. Merryman. Their report is the result of minute examination into the wrecks and disasters on every mile of coast for the previous ten years—a research into ghastly horrors for a practical end unparalleled perhaps in accuracy and patience. They recommended the erection of twenty-three life-saving stations complete, twenty-two lifeboat stations and five houses of refuge. The first class, containing all appliances for saving life on stranded vessels, and manned by regular crews during the winter months, were for flat beaches with outlying bars distant from settlements, and were required on certain points of the shores of the great lakes and on the Atlantic coast as far south as Hatteras. “Upon the coast of Florida the shores are so bold,” the report states, “that stranded vessels are usually thrown high enough upon the beach to permit easy escape from them; therefore the usual apparatus belonging to the complete stations are not considered necessary. The section of that coast from Indian River Inlet to Cape Florida is almost destitute of inhabitants, and persons cast upon its inhospitable shores are liable to perish from starvation and thirst, from inability to reach the remote settlements.” Upon these coasts it was recommended that houses of refuge should be built large enough to accommodate twenty-five persons, supplied with provisions to support them for ten days, and provided with surfboat, oars and sails. For the majority of points on the Pacific and lake coasts, where disasters were infrequent, lifeboats only were considered necessary, these in general to be manned by volunteer crews. It was proposed that these crews should be paid for services rendered at each wreck, and a system of rewards adopted in the shape of medals of honor. The estimated cost of a life-saving station complete was $5302; of a house of refuge, $2995; of a lifeboat station, $4790. A bill founded on this report was prepared by Mr. Kimball, the chief both of the Revenue Marine and Life-saving Service, and became a law June, 1874. This bill provides for the protection of the entire lake and sea-coasts of the United States by a cordon of stations, lifeboats or houses of refuge placed at all dangerous points. The stations on the Pacific coast are not yet built, but it is hoped that all will be finished and in working order by the fall
The work accomplished by the service may be clearly understood by a glance at the following figures. There is no record of the loss of life on stranded vessels previous to its formation in 1848. There remain only the terrible legends, such as those which the captain and Jacob told us, of numbers of emigrant ships and steamers yearly going down with three to four hundred souls on board. The coasts of Long Island and New Jersey have justly been called “the despair of mariners and shipowners.” During the first twenty years of the operation of the service, despite its mismanagement, the number of lives lost yearly was reduced to an average of twenty-five. Since 1871 the period of its reorganization, the loss of life on the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island has averaged but one per annum. The report for these four years, inclusive of the whole coast guarded by stations, is—
Total number of disasters, 185 Total number of lives imperiled, 2583 Total number of lives saved, 2564 Total number of lives lost, 19 Total number of shipwrecked persons sheltered at the stations, 368 Total number of days’ shelter afforded, 1307 Total value of property imperiled, $6,293,658 Total value of property saved, 4,514,756 Total value of property lost, 1,742,902
Included in this report are the fourteen lives lost on the Italian bark Giovanni near Provincetown, Cape Cod, in a storm unprecedented for its terrors. A story found its way into the papers at the time that the powder used in the mortar was damp, and that from this trifling neglect help could not be extended from the station. A strict investigation was made, and it was proved by the testimony of the people in Provincetown that all the apparatus was in perfect order and the keepers and surfmen exerted themselves heroically in aid of the doomed vessel, but that she was stranded so far from shore that it was simply impossible to reach her. In another case, that of the Vicksburg, wrecked on the Long Island coast, where a life was lost through the remissness of the keeper, the whole force of the station was discharged, and the order to that effect read to every crew in the service.
The localities of the stations and houses of refuge now legally authorized are—
Districts. Location. Stations.
1st. Coasts of Maine and New
Hampshire, 6
2d. Coast of Massachusetts,
14
3d. Coasts of Long Island
and Rhode Island, 36
4th. Coast of New Jersey,
39
5th. Coasts of Delaware, Maryland
and Virginia, 8
6th. Coasts of Virginia and
North Carolina, 10
7th. Eastern coast of Florida,
5[A]
8th. Coasts of Lakes Ontario
and Erie, 9
9th. Coasts of Lakes Huron
and Superior, 9
10th. Coast of Lake Michigan,
12
11th. Pacific coast,
8
[Footnote A: Houses of refuge.]
While we have been looking into these facts and figures the exploring party in the house on the beach have told many a terrible tale of shipwreck and half-hinted horrors, among others that of the ill-fated Giovanni.
“Suppose that a ship should be driven on this bar in the middle of the night, a storm raging,” said one of the party, “what would then be the keeper’s duty?”
The captain threw open the door of the larger room, which in the fading light looked full, but for a moment only, of ghostly shadows. There we saw boats suspended halfway from the ceiling, other mysterious apparatus ranged on either side, anchors, great cables coiled accurately in heaps, and all in as exact neatness as though upon the deck of a man-of-war.
“When a wrack is sighted,” said the captain, “the signal-officer up stairs telegraphs to the other near stations, whose keepers at once send their lifeboats, cars and surfmen here. The ship is signaled—by flags in daytime, by rockets at night.” He opened a closet in which were arranged the cases of lights, with books of instruction for their use. “The keepers ought to understand these as well as all other apparatus in the station, and under the new management they usually do. The keeper here is an old wracker, and has ’good judgment of the sea,’ as Jacob would say. He never made harness or friends in Congress,” the captain threw in with fine satire. “If the ship can be reached by a boat, this lifeboat is run into the surf. It moves on wheels, you see, and in two minutes ought to be launched and the men aboard. This ridge on the outside is an air-tight chamber for giving buoyancy. Here are the oars swung in place and the buckets for bailing, as you see.”
“Is this the English lifeboat?”
“No, sir. Two years ago the service imported a lifeboat and rocket apparatus from England to test them here. The lifeboat was found to be nearly perfect, but too heavy for launching on our flat beaches with light crews: she weighed four thousand pounds. This boat was invented by Lieutenant Stodder.”
“But if the sea be too heavy for the lifeboat to live in it?”
“Then we give the ship a line: the ball is fired from this mortar, the line being fastened to the shot by a spiral wire. Mortar, powder and matches are set, you see, ready for instantaneous use. The ball must be shot so that the line falls over the ship. Not an easy mark to hit in the night and the storm driving. Sometimes it is not done until after many trials: sometimes, as in the case of the Giovanni, it cannot be reached at all. I saw the Argyle go down eight years ago with all on board, after we had tried all night to reach her. One man was washed ashore, and we made a rope of hands out beyond the first breaker, and so got him in.”
“The men farthest out on the line had not much better chance than he?”
“No, but the man had to be got in,” carelessly. “I was going to say that as soon as the line does fall over the ship it is hauled aboard. There is a hauling-line fastened to it, and a hawser to the hauling-line. Here they all are in order. When the hawser reaches the ship it is made taut and secured to the mizzentop or mainmast, high enough to swing clear of the taffrail. It is fastened on shore by this sand-anchor. Then we send over the breeches-buoy,” pointing to a complete suit of india-rubber very similar in appearance to that used by Paul Boyton. “One man can be sent safely to shore in that. But we use the life-car most frequently.”
“A boat?”
“You may call it a covered boat if you will. That life-car, sir, was invented by Captain Douglass Ottinger, and this is the first one ever used. It was sent out to the ship Ayrshire, and more than two hundred souls were saved by it when there was no other way of giving them human help. There she is, sir.” He laid his hand with a good deal of feeling on the queer shell that hung from the ceiling.
The Ottinger life-car, the patent for which the generous inventor gave to the; public, is simply an egg-shaped case with bands of cork about it. Along the top are iron rings through which it is slung on the hawser. The car is drawn by another line from the shore to the vessel. It opens by means of a door or lid two feet square on top. Eleven passengers can be crowded inside. The lid is then screwed down and the car drawn ashore.
“Eleven!” cried one of the party. “It would not hold four comfortably.”
“Men in that extremity are not apt to stand on the order of their going,” said another.
“Nor women, neither,” added the captain; “though women always do cry out to go in the open boat rather than the car, though there isn’t half the chance for them.”
“How is it ventilated?”
“Ventilated? Lord bless you! What would be the good of it if it wasn’t air-tight? It’s under the water all the time, upside down, over and over a hundred times. There’s air in it enough to last ’em for three minutes, and it’s calculated that it can be brought ashore in less time. I’ve seen husbands put their wives into it, and mothers their little babies—them standing on deck, never hoping to live to see them again.”
“And when it was opened—”
“Well, sir, there’s curious things seen on the beach on nights of shipwreck. I’m no hand at describing. Some men stagger out of the car sick, some crying or praying, some as cool as if they’d just stepped off the train.”
The captain locked the rocket-closet, hung the key on the nail and rearranged a coil of rope which had been displaced. “Things have to be shipshape when the lives of a crew may depend on a missing match or wet powder. The houses,” he added as we came out of the door and he stopped to close it, “are built every three miles along the beach. From November 15 until April 15 the keeper and six surfmen live in this house, and take watches, patrolling the beach night and day, meeting halfway between the stations. Chief Kimball’s plan is that there shall be an unbroken line of sentries along this dangerous coast during the six stormy months.”
When the hearty old captain had left us, and we found our way again across the marshes, the solitude of the night and stormy sky and the moaning sea became oppressive again, and took on all their old meaning of death and disaster. But we looked back at the square black shadow of the little house upon the headland with its fluttering flag, and at the red light burning in the window, and felt a sense of protection and trust in the government which we had never known before.
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
In the early spring of the year 1780 two ladies attired in morning neglige were sitting together in the parlor of a fine old country mansion in lower South Carolina. The remains of two or three huge hickory logs were smouldering on the capacious hearth, for the cool air of the early morning made fires still comfortable, though as the day wore on and the southern sun gathered power the small-paned windows which opened on the lawn had been raised to admit the soft breeze, which already whispered of opening flowers and breathed the sweet fragrance of the jessamine and magnolia. These same embers would have furnished heat enough in a house of modern construction to have made the room intolerable, but as they reposed upon their bed of ashes in the depths of the wide-mouthed chimney-place, lazily sending up their little curls of smoke, they served only to create a draught-power which cooled the apartment by the free circulation of the flower-scented air. The wide lawn was green with the fresh spring grass, amid which a lively company of field-larks were busily searching for grasshoppers and grubs, their gay yellow breasts and jetty breastpins glancing in the sunlight as they raised their heads from time to time to utter their soft whistling notes. The blackbirds puffed their feathers and sounded their singular call from the branches of the old pecan tree, and the flashing of the oriole enlivened the sombre foliage of the enormous live-oaks in the avenue.
“What a lovely day!” exclaimed the elder of the two as she dropped her piece of embroidery and rose to look out upon the scene.
“Oh, how I wish we could take a long ride! Here have I been staying at Oaklands three whole weeks, and I have not been in the saddle once! I declare, Jane, this horrid war will never be over;” and Rebecca Stead drew a long sigh and leaned her pretty head thoughtfully against the sash.
“Well, suppose we ride over to The Willows?” answered Jane Elliott with a ringing laugh. “If you’ll take the old broken-winded mare, I’ll take one of the plough-mules, and Billy can go with us on the other. Wouldn’t it be fun?”
In response to the bell, Billy soon made his appearance—an elderly negro of most respectable appearance, dressed in a blue cloth coat with large brass buttons, a red plush waistcoat with flaps nearly reaching his knees, and a pair of yellow breeches with plated knee-buckles and coarse blue worsted stockings. A single glance at his face and bearing was enough to show his sense of importance and his keen appreciation of the responsibility of his position. He listened with a look of utter amazement to the orders of his young mistress, and then replied in a tone of stern authority, such as none but an old family negro servant could assume: “Miss Jane, dat mule nebber had no saddle ’pon he back sence he been born.”
“Well, Billy, it’s high time he should know how it feels.”
“He wi’ kick you’ brains out ‘fore you git on um, an’ broke you’ neck ’fore you kin git from here to de gate.”
“Oh nonsense, Billy! Have the saddle put on him at once, and get the old mare for Miss Rebecca.”
“Miss ’Becca can’t ride de ole mare tid-day, ’cause she ’way down in de pasture, an’ anybody can’t ketch um in tree hour time; an’ you can’t ride de mule, Miss Jane, ’cause you ma done tell me I must tek good care o’ you an’ de house w’ile she gone, an’ I ain’t gwine let you broke you’ neck or you’ arm—not tid-day.” And Billy quietly walked out and closed the door, leaving the young ladies half vexed and half amused at his summary disposal of their scheme.
“After Tarleton’s troop and that horrid Tory Ball took my saddle-pony out of the pasture,” said Miss Elliott, “mamma sent all the blooded horses to General Lincoln, and we hear that they were turned over to the Virginia Light Horse.”
“Yes,” replied Miss Stead with a mischievous smile, “and I hear that Colonel Washington has taken the beautiful bay mare for his own mount, and named her ‘Jane.’”
“That’s a piece of his Virginia impudence,” rejoined Miss Elliott. “I have met him only once, at General Izard’s, and I think he has taken a great liberty with my name. They say he behaved splendidly at Trenton and Princeton.”
“Oh, I wish he would call while I am here,” said her companion. “They say he is an elegant rider. I wonder if he looks like the general? I don’t believe any Virginian can ride better than our young men. I wonder if he can take up a handful of sand at a gallop, like cousin John Izard?”
“Or jump his horse on the table,” suggested Miss Elliott with a roguish glance, “as I’ve heard that Mr. Izard did one day after a club-dinner.”
Miss Stead colored slightly as she said that the gentlemen all complained of the strength of the last box of claret received from Charleston before the club was broken up.
“I hear that Colonel Washington is a fine swordsman,” said Miss Elliott, “and that his troop are all bold riders. They have fought Tarleton’s Legion once or twice in skirmishes, and they say the red-coats are rather shy of them.”
Just at this point the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Billy, bearing a peace-offering in the shape of a huge waiter of luncheon. Billy was butler and major-domo to the establishment, and the young ladies could not restrain their mirth at the profusion and variety with which the faithful fellow was evidently trying to make amends for the disappointment which his high sense of duty had compelled him to inflict upon them. Had there been a dozen instead of two, there would have been ample provision for their wants upon the broad silver salver. Cakes and jellies, preserves and sandwiches, tarts and ruddy apples, a decanter of sherry and a stand of liqueurs, left barely room enough for the dainty little plates and glasses, while Billy’s special apology appeared in the form of two steaming little tumblers of rum-punch, the characteristic beverage of the day. All severity of tone and manner had disappeared, and there was something almost chivalric in the deferential smile and rude grace with which the old fellow handed his waiter to the ladies and assured them of the harmless mildness of the punch. Depositing his burden upon a little stand within easy reach of the sofa, Billy turned to leave, but paused as his eye wandered down the opening vista of the avenue, and after gazing for a moment in silence he suddenly exclaimed, “Dere’s two sojer gemplemans comin’ t’rough de big gate.”
In an instant both the young ladies were on their feet and at the window, for such an announcement was cause enough for excitement in that time of war, when the “sojer gemplemans” might prove to be either friends or foes. Charleston had already narrowly escaped capture during the previous summer by General Prevost, who, although compelled to retire on Savannah, had worsted Lincoln’s militia army, destroying about one-fourth of the little force. In October had occurred the disastrous, attack upon Savannah, in which the gallant Pulaski lost his life, and Jasper, the hero of Fort Sullivan, received his death-wound. Sumter, the “Game-Cock” of Carolina, had retired from the State with his handful of followers badly demoralized; Marion, the “Swamp-Fox,” was concealed with his little band among the cypress-bays and canebrakes of the Pedee; and a tone of gloom and despondency prevailed among the people. In the neighborhood of Charleston all was uncertainty. The plantation residences were occupied chiefly by ladies, the gentlemen being generally with the army. Tarleton’s Legion had become widely known and feared on account of the dashing forays which that famous command was constantly making under the lead of its brave and impetuous chief. No wonder, then, that the hearts of the two young ladies at Oaklands beat quick with anxiety as they strained their gaze down the avenue, uncertain whether they should see the hated scarlet uniforms of the British troopers or the welcome blue of the Continental cavalry.
But the “big gate” to which Billy had alluded was a full quarter of a mile distant, and although the first glance satisfied the excited watchers that their visitors were friends, little more could be certain until they should approach more nearly. Patience, however, was hardly to be expected under the circumstances, and its place was effectually supplied by a little red morocco-covered spy-glass which Miss Elliott took from the table. Scarcely was it brought to bear upon the approaching horsemen when she laid it down as suddenly as she had seized it, the rich color mantling to her forehead.
“Why, Jane,” said her friend, “am I not to have a look at the strangers? Oh, I declare—yes, I do believe I know that horse. It must be—”
“It is Colonel Washington and some other officer whom I do not know,” said Miss Elliott, who had regained her self-possession completely. “You have your wish, Rebecca.”
The two visitors cantered rapidly up the broad avenue, and found Billy waiting to receive them. One was a tall, soldierly-looking man of about twenty-eight, his fine face bronzed by exposure, and his easy seat in the saddle betokening one who had been a horseman from his youth. He wore the blue coat with yellow facings and the buckskin breeches of the Continental cavalry, his red sash bound over a broad sword-belt which supported a strong sabre, while the handsome and well-muscled bay mare which he rode carried a
“You seem to have ridden far,” said: the fair hostess when the ordinary salutations had passed. “Let me order your horses to the stable to be fed.”
“I thank you very kindly, miss, but there will be scarcely time, for we are under marching orders, and must be in Charleston before sunset,” replied the colonel with a bow; and there was something in his tone which faintly suggested a mental desire to see the said marching orders in Jericho.
Perhaps young Peyton detected this, for he said immediately, “I think we had best accept Miss Elliott’s kindness, for we have a long ride before us, and we cannot tell what orders may be awaiting us at the end of it.”
“I believe Peyton is right,” said the colonel, “and if you will permit me I will ask him to give some directions to the servant.”
Billy, however, had heard enough to give him his cue, and had disappeared, nor did the summons of the bell bring him back until full ten minutes had elapsed. When he did return it was to bring in two more tumblers of punch, but this time of “the regulation size” and strength, which were handed to the guests and disposed of with bow and sentiment; and then the young orderly went out with him to see the horses stripped and the holsters deposited on the piazza before the animals were led off to be fed.
“We shall have to defer accepting your invitation to attend the dress parade until your return to camp,” said Miss Elliott.
“I regret to be obliged to say that the fortunes of war have deprived us for the present of that honor. My orders extend to the command, which broke camp this morning and is now on its march to Charleston.”
“Oh, what are we to do? We felt so safe while they were near us.”
The remark burst involuntarily from Miss Stead, who blushed and cast down her eyes as if conscious of having said too much for maidenly propriety, but the smile of acknowledgment on Colonel Washington’s face gave way to a look of grave anxiety as he replied, “No lady of Carolina shall ever need a defender while a man of my command is left to draw a sword; but we have news of movements on the enemy’s part which require our presence nearer to the city, and I have advised that all noncombatants who can possibly move into Charleston should do so at their earliest convenience. Perhaps we may meet there in a few days.”
A momentary pallor had overspread Miss Elliott’s face, but it was succeeded immediately by a proud flush as she said, “It is true, then, that General Clinton has left Savannah and is moving on Charleston?”
“Such is the report, and I fear we are badly prepared to meet him.”
“We have a righteous cause, and God is on our side,” replied the brave girl with flashing eyes. “Governor Rutledge has issued a call for all men not in service to take up arms, and the whole upper country will swarm down to meet these hireling British.”
“So we all hope and expect; and if they are only in good time, there will be no fear of the result.”
“Fear! Who fears these upstart baronets and their insolent soldiers? Oh, how I wish women could fight! If the men can’t drive them back, let us take the field, and Clinton shall never set his foot in the streets of Charleston;” and the brave little beauty looked as if she meant every word she said.
“The men cannot fail to be heroes when the eyes of such women are upon them,” exclaimed the gallant colonel, looking with amused admiration at the lovely face all aglow with patriotic excitement. “But you must let us do the fighting, Miss Elliott, while you cheer and support us with your smiles and your prayers.—Peyton, what do you think would be the result of a charge by a squadron of ladies upon Tarleton’s Legion?”
“I can’t answer for Tarleton,” laughingly replied the orderly, who had just entered the room, “but I am afraid I should throw down my arms and desert in the face of the enemy.”
“You are an ungallant fellow, Peyton, to hint even that the ladies could ever be your enemies.”
“Oh, do look there!” cried Miss Stead with a silvery laugh, and pointing through the open window: “shall we take the issue of that struggle as an omen?”
The whole party rushed to the window and looked out on the lawn. A brilliant redbird, the proximity of whose nest perhaps had fired his timid heart with courage, had made a savage assault on a bluejay, the colors of whose feathers were strikingly suggestive of the Continental uniform. For a moment the two combatants fluttered in angry strife, and the result seemed doubtful, when a female mocking-bird flew from her nest in the shrubbery and drove them both ingloriously from the field.
“That settles the matter,” exclaimed Colonel Washington, laughing gayly. “If Governor Rutledge calls out the ladies, I shall throw up my commission at once, and retire in good order to the security of private life.”
“Perhaps then Lieutenant Peyton would succeed to the command?” rejoined Miss Elliott, glancing archly at the young orderly.
“I am almost sorry that your corps has not been organized, miss, for I might then consider myself gazetted for promotion, and claim my lieutenant’s commission over your signature.” The young man spoke in a tone of gay badinage, but a shade of annoyance came over his features as he added with a slight bow, “I am only plain ‘Mr.’ Peyton as yet.”
“I beg pardon,” said Miss Elliott, “but I thought ‘lieutenant’ was an ensign’s proper title.”
“If Peyton were the ensign of the troop, his office would be a sinecure,” laughed the colonel, “seeing we have no standard for him to carry.”
“You surely don’t mean, colonel, that your gallant corps fights without colors?” said Miss Stead.
“Why, we cannot use those that we captured from the enemy, and I fear our lady friends will be unable to present us with a stand until the war is over and silk becomes more plentiful.”
Miss Elliott’s eyes flashed with a sudden impulse, and the color deepened on her cheek as she eagerly asked, “Would you carry so poor a little flag as a Carolina girl can present to you? Many a good knight has gone into battle with no richer standard than a lady’s scarf.”
“If Miss Elliott will honor my command by entrusting her kerchief to its keeping, I swear to fly it in the face of Tarleton’s Legion and defend it to the last drop of my blood.”
“Then let this be your flag,” cried the noble girl with a burst of enthusiasm which echoed that which rung in Colonel Washington’s tones. A large fauteuil, covered with heavy crimson silk embroidered with raised laurel-leaves, was standing near. Miss Elliott seized, as she spoke, the scissors from her work-basket, and in a moment had cut out the rectangular piece which covered the back and offered it to her distinguished guest. Washington bowed low with courtly grace and touched his lips to the fair hand which presented it, while young Peyton, carried away by the excitement of the moment, sprang to his feet with a cheer which started the wild birds from the shrubbery: “Colonel Washington, I claim the right, by Miss Elliott’s commission, to carry that flag into action, and I swear that it shall never be stained with dishonor while Walter Peyton has a right hand to grasp its staff.”
“Take it, my boy,” said the colonel in a voice tremulous with emotion, “and guard it with your life. With God’s help we will make that flag a terror to the enemies of our country.—Miss Elliott, accept a soldier’s gratitude for your precious gift to-day. No prouder banner ever waved over battle-field or claimed the devotion of patriotic hearts. It shall be fringed and mounted this very night in Charleston, and I pledge my sacred honor that Washington’s Light Horse shall prove worthy of their trust.”
There was a pause in the conversation which was broken by young Peyton, who rattled on for some time with Miss Stead in that light vein which the most serious circumstances cannot long repress when youth and beauty meet. Colonel Washington spoke but little, and with an evident effort at gayety which ill agreed with the earnest, thoughtful look which settled on his features, while Miss Elliott could not conceal the embarrassment which her heightened color and downcast eyes betrayed as she toyed with her embroidery, avoiding the glances of deep and ardent yet restrained admiration with which her distinguished guest regarded her. The hour had arrived when the soldiers must resume their journey; and while Rebecca Stead stood watching from the piazza the final preparations which the young orderly was making for the march, Colonel Washington took the hand of his fair hostess and after a moment’s hesitation bowed low and pressed it to his lips, but with somewhat more of warmth than was required by the stately courtesy of the day. Their eyes met for an instant, and then, without one word of spoken adieu, they parted. When Miss Stead turned to join her friend she found herself alone with old Billy, who was gazing after the fast-receding forms of the troopers. “Mass’ Tahlton done ketch de debbil ef he meet dem Virginia man to-night,” said the old fellow sententiously as he slowly retired into his pantry.
[Footnote A: This fine old relic of the Revolution is preserved by the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, South Carolina. It was borne by Colonel William Washington’s corps at Cowpens and Eutaw.]
On the 12th of May, 1780, General Lincoln, after sustaining a close siege of more than a month’s duration, surrendered Charleston, with five thousand men and four hundred pieces of artillery, into the hands of Sir Henry Clinton. The dark cloud which had long been threatening Lower Carolina now settled like a pall over the whole State, and but for two causes the whole issue of the war might have been changed. One of these was the severity of Cornwallis, who succeeded Clinton in the command, and who by his unwise policy drove the despondent people to desperation: the other was the indomitable courage and self-devoted heroism of the women, which encouraged and strengthened the flagging patriotism of the men. The militia who had been captured with the city regarded themselves as absolved from a parole which did not protect them from enlistment in the ranks of the Crown, and the irregular bands of Marion, Pickens and Sumter received large accessions. Mill-saws were roughly forged into sabres and pewter table-ware melted and beaten into slugs for the shot-guns with which the men were armed. The British dared not forage except in force, the pickets were shot from ambushes, and their Tory allies hung whenever captured. In August the disastrous battle of Camden destroyed Gates’s
It was about nine o’clock on the night of the 16th of January, 1781, that the little army was encamped between the Pacolet and Broad rivers, near a piece of thin woodland known as Hannah’s Cowpens. The weather was very cold, for the elevation of that part of the country produces a temperature equal in severity to that of a much higher latitude, but neither tents nor shanties protected the sleeping soldiers from the frosty air. Here and there a rough shelter of pine boughs heaped together to windward of the smouldering camp-fires told of a squad who had not been too weary to work for a little show of comfort; but in most cases the men were stretched out on the bare ground, their feet toward the embers and their arms wrapped up with them in their tattered blankets, which scarcely served to keep out the cold. The regular troops, who had seen some service, might have been easily distinguished from the less experienced militia by their superior sleeping arrangements. Two and sometimes three men would be found wrapped in one blanket, “spoon-fashion,” with another blanket stretched above them on four stakes to serve as a tent-fly, and their fires were usually large and well covered with green branches to prevent their burning out too rapidly. One and all, however, slept as soundly as if reposing on beds of down, while the same quiet stars smiled on them and on the anxious wives and mothers who lay waking and praying in many a distant home. In and out among the weird and shifting shadows of the outer lines the dim figures of the sentinels stalked with their old “Queen Anne” muskets at the “right-shoulder shift,” or tramped back and forth along their beats at the double quick to keep their blood in circulation. At a little distance from the infantry camp the horses of Washington’s dragoons and M’Call’s mounted Georgians were picketed in groups of ten, the saddles piled together, and a sentinel paced between every two groups, while the men were stretched around their fires, sleeping on their arms like the infantry, for it was known that Tarleton had crossed the Pacolet that day, and an attack was expected at any time. A party of officers were asleep near one of the fires, with nothing, however, to distinguish them from the men but the red or buff facings of their heavy cloaks. One of these lay with his face to the stars, sleeping
The first gray pencilings of dawn were scarcely visible when the slumbering camp was roused by the rolling notes of the reveille from the drum of little Solly Barrett,[A] the drummer-boy of Howard’s Maryland Regulars. Fully refreshed by a good night’s rest, the men prepared and ate their breakfasts with but little delay, and by seven o’clock the entire force was in line of battle, awaiting the approach of the enemy.
[Footnote A: “Solly” resided for many years after the war at Easton, Maryland. A good portrait of him is still there.]
Tarleton, flushed with the assurance of easy victory, had made a forced march during the night, and his command was much jaded when at eight o’clock he came in sight of Morgan’s outposts: notwithstanding this, however, he determined, as was fully expected by those who knew his disposition and mode of warfare, to attack the American lines forthwith. It must be left to the historian to tell how the battle raged with varying fortunes until Howard’s gallant Marylanders taught the British regulars that the despised provincials had learned the trick of the bayonet, and decided the issue of the day. Up to this moment the cavalry, which had been posted in reserve behind a slight wooded eminence, had been chafing
“Are you ready, men? Charge!” The words were scarcely off his lips ere the noble mare which he rode shot forward, touched by her rider’s spur. With a wild yell, which drowned the regular cheer of the Englishmen, the men dashed after their brave and impetuous leader, who was ever the first to cross a sabre with the enemy. Rising in his stirrups as the gallant chestnut answered the spur, Walter Peyton looked backward at the men as he raised the light staff of his little banner and shook its folds to the breeze, and the next moment he was close by the side of his chief in the very thickest of the melee. For a moment all was dust and confusion, for Tarleton’s veterans were not the men to break at the first onset, and they met the furious charge of the Virginians with a determination which promised a bloody and doubtful struggle. One stout fellow, mounted on a powerful horse, singled out the young ensign as his special quarry, not noticing, in his ardor to capture the daring little rebel flag, that the trooper who rode next to it was the gallant colonel himself. Reining back his horse almost upon its haunches, he had raised his sabre in the very act to strike when that of Washington came down with tremendous force, severing the upper muscles of his sword-arm, and at the same instant Peyton, for the first time observing his danger, dropped his rein and, grasping the flagstaff with both hands, swung it full in the face of his assailant. The man’s horse shied violently as the folds of the little banner flapped across his eyes, and as his rider fell heavily from the saddle dashed at full speed through the British line. Already this had begun to waver, and in another moment the panicstricken troopers were flying in wild confusion toward their reserve. To rally a body of frightened cavalry is no easy matter under any circumstances, but when a determined pursuing force is pressing hotly on the rear it becomes a simple impossibility. The entire command gave way as the fugitives approached, and in a little while was in full retreat. Colonel Washington, as usual far in advance of his men, caught sight of the British commander, who, with two of his aides, was endeavoring to rally a favorite regiment, and without a thought of support pressed toward the group, accompanied only by Peyton with Jane Elliott’s flag and a little bugler, a mere boy, who carried no sword, but who had drawn a pistol from his holster and kept close to the colors all through the day.
Tarleton was not deficient in personal courage, and turned to meet his old enemy in a hand-to-hand encounter. The officer nearest him struck at Washington as he passed, but missed his blow and received a bullet in his side from the young bugler’s pistol.
“Carter,” cried Tarleton to the other aide, who rode near him, “a captain’s brevet if you take that woman’s petticoat,” pointing with his sword to the saucy little flag, the story of which had reached the British camps.
But it was no woman’s hand which was there to defend it, and as the Englishman wheeled his horse for the attack Peyton’s pistol flashed almost in his face, and he fell forward on his charger’s neck, convulsively clasping it as the animal ran wildly forward unguided toward the American lines. Meanwhile, the two commanders had crossed swords, and as both were good fencers, a duel a l’outrance seemed imminent. But Tarleton had no time for chivalrous encounters. His opponent beat down his guard, and with a sudden thrust wounded the British colonel in the hand. The latter drew a pistol, and as he wheeled to follow his flying squadrons discharged it at his adversary, the ball taking effect near the knee. The battle was now really at an end, and the pursuit was abandoned at this point.
As Walter Peyton lay down beside his camp-fire that night it was with a body worn down by excitement and fatigue, but with a heart beating high with pride as he looked at the flag he had so gallantly defended, and remembered his colonel’s words of commendation, which he more than hoped meant promotion to a captain’s commission.
In the city of Charleston all was gloom and sorrow except in the little circle of society which boasted of its loyalty to the Crown. Scarcely a family but had some representative in the Continental ranks, and as all intelligence reached the city through British channels, the darkest side of every encounter between the armies was the first which the imprisoned patriots saw. The non-combatant members of all the planters’ families had moved into the city before its capitulation, and while the ladies permitted the visits and acquaintance of the English officers, they never lost an opportunity to show them how hateful they esteemed the royal cause.
It was nearly a month after the victory at the Cowpens that Miss Elliott was sitting with her mother one evening in the parlor of their city residence. Conspicuous among the furniture was a large and comfortable arm-chair upholstered in heavy crimson silk damask, but while everything else in the room was neat and even elegant, this chair appeared to be more fit for the lumber-closet, the entire square of silk having been cut from the back, leaving the underlining of coarse striped cotton exposed to view. The tones of the curfew or “first bell,” which may still be heard nightly in the seagirt old city, had just died away when a loud rap came from the heavy brass knocker on the street-door, and in a few moments old Billy appeared to announce “Captain Fraser.”
A look of slight annoyance passed over the face of the elder lady as she arranged the snowy ruffles of her cap, while the deepened color and sparkling eyes of the younger, with the almost imperceptible sarcasm of her smile, seemed to indicate mingled pleasure, defiance and contempt. The visitor who entered was resplendent in the gay scarlet and glittering lace of the British uniform, and his redundancy of ruffles, powder and sword-knot betokened the military exquisite, his bearing presenting a singular mixture of high breeding and haughty insolence. With his right hand laid upon the spot where his heart was supposed to be, while his left daintily supported the leathern scabbard of his sword, he bowed until the stiff little queue of his curled wig pointed straight at the heavy cornice. The ladies swept the floor with their graceful courtesies, that of the younger presenting the least touch of exaggeration as with folded arms and downcast eyes she sank backward before her guest. Another knock was heard, and when the names of three more of the garrison officers were announced, Miss Elliott whispered to Billy a hasty message to some of her fair friends in the neighborhood to come in and help her entertain them. These impromptu parties were quite common, and in a little while the room was sparkling with beauty, gallantry and wit. It may seem strange that the patriotic belles of the day, the fair Brewtons and Pinckneys and Rutledges, the Ravenels and Mazycks, should have cultivated such pleasant associations with the enemies of their country. But among the officers they had many old friends and acquaintances of ante-bellum days, and not a few marriages had established even closer ties. Thus, Lord Campbell, the last royal governor, was husband to Sarah Izard, the sister of General Ralph Izard, who was brother-in-law to our former acquaintance, Rebecca Stead; and even General Washington had invited Admiral Fairfax to dine, on the ground that a state of war did not preclude the exchange of social civilities between gentlemen who served under opposing flags.
Mrs. Elliott received the attentions of her daughter’s visitors with dignified grace, but with a degree of reserve which it was impossible altogether to conceal, and to which the officers had become too much accustomed to feel any offence; while the younger ladies drove the keen darts of their sarcasm home to the feelings of their hostile guests, who were forced to submit to it or forego entirely the pleasures of female society.
“May I ask if Company K has been on duty at the picket-lines to-day?” asked Miss Elliott of Captain Fraser, who had just sauntered up to her chair.
“May I answer the question after the fashion of my ancestors,” was the reply, “by asking why you should think so?”
“Only because you seem to be suffering from fatigue, which a long march might explain.”
Fraser’s company was notoriously a “fancy corps,” whose severest duty was generally to furnish the guard at head-quarters and to go through a dress parade every evening at the Battery.
“Ah, no, but I have been on inspection duty, and it’s a bore, I assure you.”
“Inspecting the flower-gardens, I presume, to be sure that there are no rattlesnakes under the rose-bushes, or the milliner-shops, to see that no palmetto cockades are made. May I insist upon a seat for you? Not that chair,” she added hastily and with heightened color as the captain was about to occupy the mutilated fauteuil: “excuse me, but that is a ‘reserved seat.’”
“Ah, I see—beg pardon,” said Fraser with a slight sneer, for the story of Washington’s flag was generally known, and also Miss Elliott’s aversion to the use of the chair by any British officer. “Somebody seems to have carried off the back of that one.”
“When last heard from,” said the beauty with curling lip, “it was at Colonel Tarleton’s back.”
“Tarleton should be court-martialed for that affair at Cowpens,” said Fraser with some warmth, and forgetting the proffered seat he prepared to take his leave.
“Perhaps Captain Fraser would like to have had a hand in the ‘affair’ also,” added Miss Elliott with a demure smile. This allusion to Tarleton’s wound was too much for the gallant captain, and again elevating the point of his queue toward the ceiling, but this time without his hand to his heart, he left the room with a face somewhat redder than his uniform.
There are defeats which are more glorious than victory, and one of these it was which, on the 8th of September, 1781, gave to Jane Elliott’s flag the title which has come down with it to posterity. In the earlier days of its history the saucy little standard was known to the gallant men who followed it to action as “Tarleton’s Terror,” and sometimes it is even now spoken of as “the Cowpens Banner.” But the name by which its brave custodians most love to call it is “the Eutaw Flag,” It is hard to realize as one stands beside the lovely fountains which flow to-day as they did a hundred—or perhaps a thousand—years ago, that close by these placid waters was fought one of the most desperate and bloody struggles of a long and cruel war. The sunfish and bream floated with quivering fins or darted among the rippling shadows on that autumn morning as we see them doing now. The mocking-bird sang among the overhanging branches the same varied song which gladdens our ears, and the wild deer then, as now, lay peacefully in the shady coverts of the neighboring woods. Who knows what they may have thought when they heard their only enemy, man, ring out his bugle-call to slip the war-dogs on his fellows, or when the sharp crack of the rifle told them for the first time of safety to themselves and of death to their wonted destroyers?
Already had “Light-horse Harry” Lee struck the first blow victoriously in the capture of Coffin and the discomfiture of his force. Already for several hours the old black oaks had quivered beneath the thunder of artillery more fearfully destructive than that of Heaven itself as Williams hurled back from his field-battery the iron hail with which the enemy strove to overwhelm him. Already had Howard’s gallant Marylanders, the heroes of the Cowpens, crossed bayonets with the veteran “Irish Buffs” and forced them in confusion from the field. Majoribanks, with his regulars, grenadiers and infantry, was strongly posted behind a copse too dense to be forced by cavalry, and yet to dislodge him was Colonel Washington’s special duty. Pointing with his sword toward a narrow passage near the water, he dashed the spurs into the flanks of his gallant mare and called on his men to follow. There was a momentary pause, for the duty was of the most desperate character, but Captain Peyton snatched the little banner which he had carried so long from the hand of the sergeant who had succeeded to its charge, and raising it above his head spurred after his leader. As the silken folds fluttered out on the air a ringing cheer went up from the troop, and the whole line, wheeling into sections so as to pass through the narrow gap, dashed forward as one man. It was a daring attempt, and terribly did they pay for their audacity. A perfect storm of bullets greeted the brave Virginians, and nearly one-half of them went down, horse and man, beneath its fearful breath ere the other half were in the midst of the enemy’s ranks. Those were days when a certain simplicity of character made the soldier believe that bayonets and sabres were terrible weapons and meant to do terrible work. No rewards were then offered for “a dead cavalryman” or for “a bloody bayonet.” There were cloven skulls at Eutaw as at Crecy, and men were transfixed by each other’s deadly bayonet-thrusts. As Washington, maddened by the loss of his brave troopers, swung his sharp blade like the flail of death, a shot from the musket of a tall grenadier pierced the lung of his noble bay, and as the falling steed rolled over on her gallant rider the man shortened his musket and buried the sharp steel in the colonel’s body. A second thrust would have followed with deadly result had not the British major, Majoribanks, seized the arm of the soldier and demanded the surrender of his fallen and bleeding foe. The tide of battle had receded like some huge swell of ocean, and as the wounded hero struggled to his feet he found himself surrounded by enemies, to contend with whom would have been folly. Turning his feeble glance for a second toward the retreating remnant of his shattered command, he caught a glimpse through the smoke and dust of his little battle-flag fluttering in the distance, and fast receding toward the point whence Hampton’s bugles were already sounding the rally. Neither William Washington nor his “Eutaw Flag”
ROBERT WILSON.
To those who have had but little opportunity to examine the inner workings of the Catholic Church the subject of the conventual life has always been something of a puzzle. Of course it has been difficult for them to obtain a personal insight into its details, just as it would be difficult to gain admittance into the mosque of St. Sophia or a Hindu community of religious. Curiosity, unsatisfied, betakes itself to hearsay, and since those who know most are generally most silent about their knowledge, it is to the gossip of ignorance or prejudice that curiosity looks for an answer. Distorted views or imaginary descriptions end by being received into the mill of public opinion, and issue thence ground into gospel truth and invested with mysterious (because fictitious) interest. It is strange that a phase of life which is in constant practice at the present day, often within a stone’s throw of our own doors, and which has personal ramifications in the families of our neighbors and acquaintances, should still be so much of a phenomenon to the public mind. In England, France, Italy, Germany and America I have been familiarly acquainted with it, have studied its principles and its details under many varying forms, and never found it less interesting because it was not mysterious. Human, fallible beings are the inhabitants of monasteries either for males or females, with individual peculiarities and different sympathies—by no means machines, but free and intelligent agents, each with a character as individual as that of separate flowers in a large garden—full of personality and of human imperfection.
In Rome, not far from the Fountain of Trevi—of whose waters it is said that they have the power to ensure the return to Rome of any one who has drunk of them in a cup not heretofore devoted to common purposes—is the spacious convent called San Domenico e Sisto. Here the first convent of Dominican friars was established, and the spot is historic ground in the annals of the order of Preachers. In the turbulent thirteenth century, when papal, feudal and democratic parties opposed each other in Rome, and the vigorous sap of half-tamed barbarian life still coursed through the pulses of Italy, Saint Dominic rose like a reformer, a lawgiver and a peace-maker. On the other side of the Tiber, entrenched behind baronial walls and fiercely protected by baronial champions, was a convent of women whose practice of their vows had become too relaxed for such a bad example to be allowed to remain unreproved. The ecclesiastical authorities wished peremptorily to disestablish the convent and filter its inmates through some neighboring religious houses more zealous and more edifying in their conduct. But the nuns, who were mostly of noble families, appealed to their charters, their immunities and exemption from papal jurisdiction. Their fathers and brothers, the formidable barons who held within the papal city many strongholds well garrisoned, took up their quarrel and dared the world to dispossess the refractory sisterhood. Saint Dominic had just brought his friars to the dilapidated house then known as San Sisto, had caused rapid repairs to be made, and in his fervor had created round himself a nucleus of ardent reformers. The Gordian knot was referred to him, and with characteristic abruptness he promised to cut it at once. He came alone to the gates of the convent, presented no credentials from pope or cardinal, and asked an interview with the abbess. He spoke of the holiness of an austere life, the reward of those that “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth,” the merit of obedience, the need of reform, the great work that his order was doing for God, and the call for more laborers in the field: he proposed to the nuns to be his helpers among their own sex, and his coheiresses in the heavenly reward of the future. His eloquence and zeal soon melted the haughty resolve of the rebellious but still noble-minded women. Roused to a new sense of power and responsibility, they embraced his rigid rule, and with the enthusiasm of their sex, that never halts midway in reform, became models of austerity. The better to signify to the world the spiritual change wrought in their temper, they migrated from the abode which they had sworn to make the symbol and palladium of their independence, and went to San Sisto, Saint Dominic taking his monks to repeople the convent across the Tiber left vacant by the submissive sisterhood.
It is with this new house, henceforth called San Domenico e Sisto, that one of my earliest recollections of conventual life is connected. The order is one which enjoins strict enclosure. The dress is of coarse white serge or flannel, consisting of a long, narrow tunic with flowing sleeves drawn over tight ones of linen; a scapular or stole (i.e., a piece of straight stuff half a yard broad worn hanging from the shoulders both behind and before); a leathern girdle round the waist, from which hangs a rosary, large, common and set in steel; strong, thick sandals; a linen wimple enveloping the face and hiding the ears, neck and roots of the hair; a woolen veil, black for the professed nuns, white for the novices, and of white linen for the lay sisters; and over all an immense black cloak, falling around the figure in statuesque folds.
In this order, and almost invariably in every other, a candidate is admitted at first as a postulant for a period of six months—a sort of preliminary trial of her fitness for the religious life. She wears ordinary clothes during this time—plain and black, of course, but not of any prescribed shape. Sometimes, however, she is required by custom to wear a plain black cap. After six months she is admitted as a novice—i.e., she solemnly puts off the secular dress and wears the habit of the order, making the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for the space of one year only. The details of the ceremony vary in different orders, but the ceremony itself is called in all by the generic name of “clothing” or “taking the white veil.” In orders where a white woolen veil is the badge of profession (these are not many) a linen one is equally the mark of the novice and the lay sister. Although there exists for convenience’ sake a distinction between choir-nuns and lay sisters—the former paying a dowry to the common fund on the day of their entrance, and the latter bringing their manual service to the house instead of any offering—still, the difference is not spiritual, and beyond the mere distribution of labor is not practically discernible. In orders where the education of youth is the primary object, the lay sisters, under the supervision of the choir-nun to whose charge the housekeeping is directly entrusted, perform all the menial service, which would otherwise make too many inroads on the time of the teaching nuns; but in other orders, the Carmelites for instance, the lowest work, be it of the kitchen, the laundry or the chamber, is undertaken in turn by every member of the community. When Madame Louise, the daughter of Louis XV. of France, became a Carmelite nun, the first task assigned her was the washing of coarse dishes and the sweeping of floors. A parallel case is that of the Cistercian monks, who to this day, at their famous farm-monastery at Mount St. Bernard, England, are bound by their rule to labor with their hands so many hours a day. No exception is made for the abbot himself; and when we visited the establishment
To resume our sketch of the Dominican nuns in Rome. It is the custom in Italy for a young lady about to “enter religion” to choose a godmother or madrina, a lady of proper age and mature experience, who acts as her chaperon during the few weeks preceding the “clothing.” She comes forth from the convent where she has been a postulant, and, dressed in the garb of the world, makes formal visits to all her relations, friends and patrons, assists at public ceremonies in the local churches, even visits some places of interest, such as museums and galleries. This is her solemn farewell to the world, and she is supposed thus to have another trial given to the steadfastness of her resolve, another chance to abandon it before it is too late. A young girl of an illustrious Roman family, but of very slender fortune, was about to enter the Dominican order at the time to which I allude, in 1853. Her only sister had for some years been a nun of a strictly enclosed order, and Mademoiselle G——, having chosen as her madrina an English Catholic lady who had been enabled to show her some kindness while still in the world, went to bid farewell to this elder sister. The meeting was very affecting: the sisters could not see each other face to face—a thick grating separated them. The elder had long been a spiritual guide to the younger: she had led her mind in the direction of the cloister, and now rejoiced sincerely that God had smoothed away the family difficulties and pecuniary embarrassments which for some time had stood in the way of her vocation. Still, natural affection was not stifled in the generous, unselfish heart of the cloistered nun, and she wept with her sister at the thought that, though the walls of the same city would hold them both till death, and hardly a few blocks of houses separate their convent homes, yet in the flesh they should never meet again. The English godmother sat in a remote corner of the cool, shady parlor, sympathizing in silence with the touching scene, but keeping as much in the background as etiquette and custom allowed, that she might not intrude on this last farewell. At length the
At last the day came. Early in the morning the madrina arrived at the convent with her two little girls of six and eight years old dressed in white as bridesmaids, or, as the Italian term angiolini has it, little angels. They bore delicate baskets filled with white flowers to strew before the “bride,” and their office during the ceremony was to hold the novice’s gloves, fan and handkerchief. The young girl herself, looking pale and earnest, walked up the aisle of the convent chapel in bridal robes of white silk, with a veil and wreath on her head, and round her neck a string of pearls, an heirloom in the G—— family. Her brother, the only male representative of her once powerful house, was present in the outer chapel, full of grief at a sacrifice which he had never countenanced, and ready to claim that morning the only legacy of his sister the promise of which he had been able to secure—the thick coils of her black hair when they should have been cut off preparatory to her taking the novice’s veil. The scene was very solemn. The nuns sat in their carved stalls within the grating whose black bars divided them from the “bride” and her friends in the ante-chapel: the chant of psalms and versicles came down from a hidden gallery, and the priest in rich vestments stood at the foot of the altar within the railing. The service went on in the midst of a palpable hush; the very air seemed hardly to vibrate; the bride, attended by her two angiolini, left her gorgeous kneeling-chair and advanced to the open door in the grating, where the priest met her. Question and answer were interchanged in Italian, and the young girl vowed that of her own free will she left the world and joined the order of St. Dominic. Prayers in Latin followed, then again a chanted psalm, and Mademoiselle G—— was led away through the iron-grated door, which was then closed. It was not long ere she reappeared in the long close tunic of white serge, her head covered with a temporary veil of coarse linen and her feet shod in sandals. A procession of nuns, each bearing a lighted taper, escorted her to the foot of the altar (everything was visible through the grating), and she knelt before the officiating priest. A white woolen veil was handed to him, which he blessed with holy water, the sign of the cross and the prescribed ejaculations accompanying these rites: he then laid it on her head as a “symbol of the virgin modesty” to which she was now pledged. Two nuns were at hand to pin it into the right folds while a silver ring was being blessed in the same
To a few ladies and to the angiolini a special permission to enter the enclosure was given in honor of the day: a festive meal was served in the bare, cool refectory, the rule of silence being relaxed for the special occasion, and the nuns wearing a happy, child-like expression that hardly varied in the face of the youngest novice and that of the septuagenarian “mother.” The strangers were shown through the dormitories, the kitchen, the laundry, the garden, the community-room, where embroidery, painting and study diversify the labors of the broom and the dishcloth, and everywhere the same exquisite neatness struck the eye. Everything used in the house was of the coarsest description—the linen like sack-cloth, but speckless; the delf as thick and rough as if made for sailors; the floors mostly of brick or stone; the furniture of unpainted deal. Over each bed, which is only a board on trestles covered with heavy sacking, is a common crucifix and a sprig of box or olive blessed on Palm Sunday. The sisters sleep in their tunics. The library is common property, but no one may use or read any book save by permission of the superioress. The rules of fasting and abstinence are not exactly the same in every convent of the order, but the broad rule is that meat should be eaten only on great holidays, vegetables and farinaceous preparations, such as most Italians are not unskilled in, forming the staple of the nuns’ food. Fish is almost as rare a luxury as meat. Their bread is coarse and brown, and their drink indifferently water or a wine so sour that it is practically vinegar. Not that these nuns are not good cooks and bakers: witness the delicate sweetmeats, biscuits and pastry they offer to strangers on such festival days as the one just described, the fruit-preserves in blocks sold for
These Dominicanesses rise at four in the morning and dine at eleven, making after that only one slight meal in the evening—bread and vegetables, for instance, or a saucerful of macaroni. At stated times they assemble in the chapel for the singing of the “divine office,” and always have an early mass, at which the whole community receives holy communion. This is administered by the priest through a square opening in the iron grating dividing the nuns from the altar. At eight, or at latest nine o’clock in the evening, all are in bed, whence they rise again at midnight (in some orders at two o’clock in the morning, but this custom involves rising somewhat later, generally five o’clock) for matins and lauds.
The duties of separate departments are judiciously divided among the sisters. There is the infirmarian; the econome, or housekeeper, to whose share falls the supplying of the larder; the librarian, the sacristan, the portress (often in cloistered orders this position, which is exceptional in its exemptions, involves the ordering of outside business matters), the care-taker of the garments and linen, the gardener, the secretary, the mistress and sub-mistress of novices. The house is managed like clockwork. Punctually as the bell rings each sister goes to the task appointed for that hour, and leaves it, no matter how important or absorbing it may be, for the duty appointed by the rule for the next division of time. Silence prevails among the sisters at almost all hours: for at most three times a day speech is permitted, and seldom for more than half an hour at a time. During meals one sister reads the Lives of the Saints aloud. Each in her turn takes the place of server at table. The superioress alone has power to dispense with the rule of silence in case of necessity, as she transacts most of the business, social or legal, of her community.
During the year of novitiate the novices are under the direct rule of the mistress of novices, whose authority over them is paramount, though she herself is of course under a vow of obedience to the superior. When a novice receives a visit from one in the world she is accompanied by the “mistress,” and if the visitor be a near relation and a woman the curtain behind the grating is withdrawn; if only a friend, the visitor does not even see the nun, as the thick curtain is drawn, and the only communication possible is by speech. It is generally possible,
The year after the “clothing” of Sister Maria Colomba we witnessed the final ceremony of her “profession”—that is, of her assuming the black veil and renewing her religious vows for life. Hitherto, she had been free to return to the world and marry: henceforth such a return (unless by a dispensation so rarely given that it is practically non-existent) would be sacrilege. The details of the ceremony vary in different orders, and with those which are not cloistered the scene is far less impressive. What we were going to see included the most solemn forms ever used. This time the whole service took place behind the grating: there were no “bridesmaids” now, no shadow of worldly pomp was borrowed to enhance the last and momentous consecration of religion. The novice knelt between the superior and the mistress of novices, each bearing a lighted taper. The white veil was taken from her head, and a black one, previously blessed with holy water sprinkled over it in the form of a cross, substituted: the low chant of the unseen choir of nuns sounded impressively as the echo of another world. Then came the renewal of the dread vows, binding now until death, and the voice of the young girl seemed firm though low: her face wore a calm, peaceful look, subdued by the solemn occasion, yet irrepressibly suggesting a joy unknown in the world, where joy is seldom free from passion. The most interesting ceremony, however, was yet to come. The slow chant shaped itself into the words of the psalm De Profundis, the special prayer which in the Catholic Church is reserved for the dead, and four professed nuns advanced toward their new sister, who was now prostrate at the foot of the altar. Each held the corner of a funeral pall, which they slowly; dropped over the figure of Sister Maria Colomba, and, kneeling, held it over her
Ten years after our farewell to Sister Maria Colomba behind the bars of the convent-parlor we saw her again, and, armed with a papal permission, were shown by her over the whole convent. Those rare occasions when a stranger is allowed to penetrate the “enclosure” are always gala-days for the nuns. I remarked the blithe, youthful look that shone on all their faces: Sister Maria Colomba herself, from a pale, nervous girl, had expanded into a strong, hale, buxom woman. The glow of health was on her cheek, the sparkle of innocent mirth shone in her eye. There was one among the sisters who gleefully asked me to guess at her age. She was a sweet, fresh-complexioned, matronly woman. “Not more than fifty, good mother,” was the answer.
She laughed and gently clapped her hands. “Add twenty years to that,” she answered with an innocent burst of pride. Then she told how she had entered the order while yet in her “teens,” had held half the offices of trust in the community, and had never missed any of the most rigid fasts or absented herself once from the midnight office, never having known so much as a day’s ill-health. “Ah, a nun’s life is a healthy one, child, as well as a happy one,” she said in conclusion.
We went over the kitchen, laundry, refectory, dormitories, chapel, garden, etc. Just the same as before—a little “calvary” at one end of the garden and a rough picture of a Madonna in an arbor, the long, echoing corridors spotless as the deck of a man-of-war, and the smiling faces making a very flower-garden of the community-room. We left loaded with specimens of the nuns’ work—Agnus Deis in frames of silver filigree dotted with white roses and hanging from white satin ribbon-bows; flake-like biscuits of peculiar flavor; and baskets, pincushions, etc. of delicate workmanship. I do not know whether this convent is still in the hands of the Dominicanesses, so many in Rome having become barracks since the new royal authority superseded that of the pope. But the picture of San Domenico e Sisto as it was in 1853 and 1863 may yet interest many who perhaps will never have the opportunity of seeing such an establishment for themselves.
This is a very fair sample of the convents of the stricter and cloistered orders: there are some exceptional houses, such as that of the Sepolte Vive, where the rule is far more austere. There is but one convent of this description in Rome, and I believe one or two in France. It is a noteworthy fact that most of the strictest observances of penance originated in France, and are continued there to this day. This convent of the Sepolte Vive ("Buried Alive”) is not formally sanctioned by the papal authority, but only tolerated. The nuns were forbidden more than ten years ago to admit any more novices, and although the individual zeal of those who started the order was not exactly censured, still a tacit intimation of its being considered excessive and imprudent was given by the highest ecclesiastical court. Among their customs (which much resemble those of the Trappist monks) these nuns have that of digging their own graves, and as the cemetery is small and included in the “enclosure,” the oldest graves are opened after a period of forty or fifty years, and the crumbling contents ejected to make room for the lately deceased. The death of a nun’s nearest relation, be it father, mother, brother or sister, is made known to the superior alone, and she in her turn announces it, not to the bereaved one, but to the whole sisterhood, in this manner: They are all assembled in the community-room, and admonished to “pray for the soul of the father or mother” (as the case may be) “of one among their number.” To the day of her death the nun never knows how near and dear by the ties of Nature may have been the soul for which she has prayed every day since the announcement was made.
The Sepolte Vive, when found guilty of any breach of the rule, are labeled with a ticket attached to their habit, and on which their fault is written in large, conspicuous letters—for instance, “Disobedience,” “Curiosity,” “Talkativeness”—and this they wear at their ordinary avocations for as many hours as the superioress commands. They never undress on going to bed, and wear the same habit winter and summer, the stuff being too hot for the one and too cold for the other; so that at all times the penance is the same. On the wrists many of them wear iron manacles that graze the skin and cause constant irritation at every turn of the hand: this is sometimes imposed as a penance, but very often is voluntarily inflicted on themselves by zealous members of the sisterhood. Before the prohibition to receive additional novices the sisterhood consisted of a fixed number, and when a vacancy occurred by the death of one the place was filled by the first on the list of postulants. This list was always a large one, and generally contained many names belonging to the noblest families of Rome. These details were gathered from the same lady who acted as madrina to the Dominican nun Sister Maria Colomba; and when she and a friend obtained permission from
The Carmelites are an order spread wide over the Christian world. The reform of Saint Teresa was sadly needed among these nuns three hundred years ago, and the recital of the vehement opposition made to her efforts shows the merit due to her. At the present day the order is one of the strictest in existence. The habit is of coarse brown serge, including the tunic and scapular, a cord round the waist, sandals (in England and other northern climates shoes are allowed), a black veil and an ample white cloak. They rise at two o’clock, winter and summer alike, to sing matins, and when they retire to rest at night one of their number walks through the corridors—in this order each nun has a cell—springing a rattle and repeating in a clear tone a verse of Scripture to serve as a subject of meditation before going to sleep. In the choir the Carmelites are only permitted the use of three notes, the reason alleged for this restriction being that the service of God must not run the risk of becoming an occasion of temptation to the singers. These nuns are very strictly cloistered, and their rules regarding visitors are much the same as those described at length in the beginning of this paper.
The cloistered orders are less numerous, but also less known, than the communities formed for active duty, such as education and nursing the sick; but in describing their constitution and rules we show the reader the true basis on which the more modern and active orders are constituted. The traditions of the spiritual life came down through them, and they represent the principle of vicarious oblation which animates all the different phases of convent life; i.e. the substitution of a small body of voluntary servants of God for the entire world, which ought to be perpetually engaged in His service and worship. The Benedictines, Capuchins and Visitation nuns are also cloistered, but the last are the only ones of this description who are likewise teachers of youth. Many very superior women belong to this order, which, except for the enclosure, practices no special physical austerities. The principle of the rule is the subduing of the will and the curbing of the spirit. The order is a recent one, and was instituted by Saint Francis of Sales while Beza ruled in Geneva and the Reformation had just disturbed the religious balance of Europe. With consummate
Even to this day there is hardly a noble family of Catholic Europe that has not one or more representatives among the religious orders. In England, both among “converts” and families of old Catholic stock, there are many girls whose names have been absorbed into those given at the same time as the ring and veil of a novice. In Flanders there are fully half a dozen convents—at Bruges, Antwerp and Louvain—emphatically called “English,” and founded by scions of great English families exiled for their adherence to the old faith under Elizabeth and James I. They are mostly Augustinians. The new order of the “Sacred Heart” has drawn to it women from Russia, Spain, America, as well as from its native land of France, and the Sisters of Charity have won a worldwide fame in the hospitals of the East and the recent battle-fields of the West.
I have dwelt chiefly on the life of the old contemplative, cloistered orders, because they are less known to the public and more mistakes are made about their constitution and rules, and also because in these old cradle-institutions are hidden the roots of the whole religious system which to this day crops out so vigorously in works of mercy over every land where the Catholic Church has a foothold. Among the uncloistered orders of religious women—and here we expect to be better understood and more fairly met by those whose knowledge of “religion” is not personal—there are many that fulfill heroic missions, perform useful tasks, or even silent, uncomplaining drudgery. In all large European towns the cornette of the Sister of St. Vincent of Paul is seen in hospital, prison and asylum, in the garret of the dying workman as well as by the bed where the warrior lies in state—in the humble schools of the lowest suburbs and in the creches of the darkest byways.
The creche—so called in remembrance of the crib of Bethlehem—is an institution of the greatest use to poor women obliged to work for their living. They either find their children an insuperable bar to their labor, or else a source of constant anxiety during their absence. To the creche, however, they can take the little ones in the early morning and leave them till late at night, paying only a small sum, such as five cents a day, if they are able, while if circumstances warrant their being exempted even this is not required. The house is supported chiefly by voluntary contributions, and the sisters often have lay assistants eager to share in their labor of love. The children are taken in at all ages, the tiniest, unweaned infant not excepted: there are little cots of all sizes prepared for them, an abundance of milk, toys for the older ones, picture-books, etc. They are fed three times a day, washed and combed before being sent home (although constant applicants are expected to bring their children tidy and neat on first arrival), and if the mother fails to return at night, they are of course housed with the tenderest care. As there would be no room to accommodate permanent baby-boarders without impairing the original intention for which the creche is opened, these little waifs, if not claimed after three nights and days, are sent to the foundling asylum: this, however, does not often occur. There are many of these institutions scattered through France: London has two, and New York will soon have one—perhaps by this time it has already been opened. A woman earning her bread by hard work would have to leave her children in the care of some neighbor, who most likely would fail in her task or teach the children bad things, and demand some compensation all the same. If the eldest child were left in charge of younger infants, as is so often the case with the honest poor, the chances are that it will break or injure its spine by carrying the little ones. All this anxiety is avoided by this beautiful and inviting arrangement, which is generally under the management of the Sisters of Charity. The London creches have a night school for working girls and grown women in connection with the principal part of the institution; also a Sunday school for children. Among the rules is one which forbids the wearing of artificial flowers or any tawdry finery during school-time. But in another part of London artificial flowers in a Sunday bonnet are a sign of a reclaimed female drunkard, as the clergyman has hit on the ingenious method of advising the women to leave off drinking, that they may be able to afford some Sunday finery wherewith to please their husbands’ eyes and to hold up their heads with the best in church!
Old age is as helpless as infancy, and less attractive in its helplessness, so that the task undertaken by the Little Sisters of the Poor is still more meritorious when performed in the devoted spirit which characterizes them. They are literally the servants of beggars: they are bound to possess nothing and to hoard nothing; they live on the refuse of refuse, begging the crumbs from rich men’s tables to feed the hungry ones under their care, and when these are satisfied sitting down to the scanty remains. They have a large establishment in London, which I once visited, but which has since been divided into two, the aim of both continuing the same. The sisters wear a very unpretending black gown and cap: when out of doors they add to this a poke-bonnet and thick veil, with a large black shawl. They have a little donkey-cart, which they drive themselves, and which makes daily pilgrimages all over town, stopping at the houses of the rich of all denominations and receiving contributions of that which is too often thought below the cook’s while to claim as a perquisite. So laden, the Little Sisters return to their old people, and a transformation begins in the vast kitchen. No one would believe what savory dishes they manufacture out of the leavings and parings of great houses: everything is sifted, cleaned, washed, as the case requires; each kind of food is carefully separated and placed in its appointed place; an immense cauldron is continually on the fire, and soups and jellies are in a constant state of fusion and preparation. Puddings of all sorts come out of the renovating oven: joints of roast meat are the only things which are exceptional, and sometimes the more generous charity of some outsider adds even this luxury to the usual fare. The Little Sisters of the Poor clothe as well as feed their charges: for this, too, they trust to charity, and left-off clothes are a great boon to them. They are so ingenious that there is hardly a thing of which they cannot make a deft use. They have houses in New York and Philadelphia, and already do an immense deal of good among the destitute aged poor.
The Order of Sion is a rather peculiar one, its principal object being the conversion to Christianity and subsequent education of young Jewesses. It has been founded within the last forty years by the brothers Ratisbonne, both of them Jews of distinction converted to Christianity. The elder brother (they are both priests now) superintends the order in Europe: the younger resides at the mother-house at Jerusalem. The convent is an educational establishment, where the daughters of Orientals of all kinds are received—Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, etc. In Europe the houses, of course, do not confine themselves to Jewish pupils, else they would find less work than their many hands could do, but receive boarders and give a solid education like the other and more fashionable convents. As a child I lived nearly a year in one of these houses,
The convent of the Assumption at Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, is one renowned for its excellent educational advantages. I spent a week there one winter on a visit to a near relative among the pupils, and had an opportunity to observe the clock-like life of the place. All the girls I have known to be educated there were better scholars than any brought up elsewhere. There were many English and American girls, besides Poles, Germans and West Indian Creoles. The war of 1860-64 left traces of strange animosity among the Northern and Southern children: it was hardly credible that such a spirit could animate young children so long removed from the immediate home influences that would otherwise have accounted for the feeling. Among the nuns were several English women, clever and deeply read, but softer-hearted than most scholars who have had too much to do with the world. There was also a sister of Pere Hyacinthe among the Assumptionists, and the great orator himself often came to the convent-chapel to preach simple little sermons to the school-girls. His sister was terribly crushed by the news of his defection from the Catholic Church, and, I believe, refused even to see him again.
A very beautiful scene which I witnessed on the 8th of December in this convent was the renewal of the vows. The mass was celebrated in the chapel at five in the morning, of course by gas- and candle-light. The body of the chapel was perfectly clear, the community sat in carved wooden stalls round the altar, the pupils assisted from the galleries above, and hidden under the gallery was the small but very perfect choir of nuns and children. The hymns of Pere Hermann, a famous pianist and composer, a pupil of Liszt, a convert from Judaism, and afterward a Carmelite friar, are very popular in France, and of these the music
The order of the Good Shepherd is one that is known throughout the world. It has branch houses in every country. The one to which I shall specially refer is in New York. It stands on the banks of the East River, overlooking Astoria and Long Island, and from its top windows the eye reaches far up the Sound. Like all convents, it is marvelously clean. The order is devoted to the reclaiming of fallen women, and in this instance the house is a government reformatory. A certain annual subsidy is guaranteed by the city authorities, but voluntary contributions and the industry of the inmates give more than half toward the real support of the house. Three sorts of women are under the care of the nuns: (1) those whom the judges send there as criminals for a specified term; (2) those whom their friends send in hope of their being quietly reformed without the intervention of justice; and (3) those who seek of their own accord to do penance and earn forgiveness for their sins. This is of course the most hopeful class, and it frequently happens that these penitents become in time permanent inmates, and even nuns. In the latter case, as the rule of the order does not allow of the reception of any woman with a stain on her reputation, they are clothed in the habit of the Carmelite Third Order (brown serge tunic and black veil), in which the austerities are not very great. They go through the usual novitiate and make their vows in the regular manner: they are then called “Magdalens,” and inhabit a portion of the house reserved for them, say their office at stated hours in their own chapel, contiguous to that of the Good Shepherd nuns, and live under obedience to the superioress of the latter. I saw about a dozen of them taking their evening walk in a pretty enclosed garden by the river-side. Other women who do not feel inclined to so full a renunciation of their liberty bind themselves by a promise, good for one year only, to the service of the house, and wear a semi-religious kind of cap and a scarlet badge with the letter P or F: they are divided into two classes, under the patronage of Saint Joseph and Saint Patrick. They renew the promise from year to year, and often spend their
Nuns are by no means a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women: they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn: many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women. At Montreal there is a large establishment of the Sisters of the Congregation de Notre Dame, generally called Congregation Sisters, founded by Margaret Bourgeoys. They are the great educational sisters of Lower Canada. They own St. Paul’s Island, some distance above the city: this is their farm, and one of the nuns, called the sister econome, has to visit it frequently and superintend matters, being the stewardess and committee of ways and means and revenue department combined. Of course a good horse is desirable for these drives, and their horses being one source of profit, the econome feels that the reputation of the breed ought not to be depreciated by her own “turnout.” The young men of the town often meet her on the road and try to distance her, but this she will never permit, and her horse, faultlessly groomed and in splendid condition, always comes off the winner in these innocent races. One day, however, the bishop, having heard
LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.
BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF “PATRICIA KEMBALL.”
SMALL CAUSES.
The frost came early this year; and by the second week in December the ponds and shallows in the neighborhood of North Aston were covered with ice that made good sliding-grounds for the children. Presently it grew and spread till the deeper waters were frozen over, and a skating-rink was formed of the Broad that bore the heavier weights without danger. It was a merry time for the North Astonians; and even the elder men strapped on their skates and took colds and contusions in their endeavors to double back on their supple youth and to forget the stiffer facts of time. As for the young people, they were in the full swing of innocent enjoyment; and the girls wished that the frost would last through the whole of the winter, so that they might make up skating-parties with the boys every day, and avoid the unmeaning deadness of “tender” weather.
This ice had been in perfect condition for three days and the Broad had been thronged, but Leam had not appeared. All the other young ladies of the country had come, Adelaide Birkett one of the most diligent in her attendance, for was not Edgar Harrowby one of the most constant in his? But though more than one pair of eyes had looked anxiously along the road that led to Ford House, which some people still continued to call Andalusia Cottage, no lithe, graceful figure had been seen gliding between the frosted hedgerows, and Edgar, like Alick, had skated in disappointment, the former with the feeling of an actor playing to an empty house when he made his finest turns and she was not there to see them; the latter with the self-reproach of one taking enjoyment abroad while the beloved is sitting in solitude and dreariness at home.
At last, on the fourth day, she came down with her father; and to at least two on the ground the advent of a slender-waisted girl with dark eyes and small feet changed the whole aspect of things, and made life for the moment infinitely more beautiful and desirable than it had been. It was a brilliant day, with as fine a sun as England can show in winter—no wind, but a clear air, crisp, dry and exhilarating, Every one was there—Edgar, the most graceful of the skaters; Alick, the most awkward; Dr. Corfield, essaying careful little spurts, schoolboy fashion, along the edges; and the portly rector, proud to show his past superiority in sharp criticism on the style of the present day as a voucher for his own greater grace and skill in the days when he too was an Adonis for the one part and an Admirable Crichton for the other, and carried no superfluous flesh about his ribs. Among them, too, looking on the scene as if it was something in which he had no inherited share, as if these were not men and women to whom he was sib on Adam’s side, but cunningly contrived machines whose movements he contemplated with benign indifference, was to be seen the mild philosophic occupant of Lionnet—that Mr. Gryce of whom no one knew more than that he studied dead languages through the day and caught moths and beetles in the twilight, had come without letters of introduction and was never seen at church; hence that he was a man of whom to beware, and a dangerous element among them. The pendulum of acceptance, which had swung so far on one side in the unguaranteed reception of Madame de Montfort, had now gone back to the corresponding extent on the other; and no one, not even Mr. Birkett as the clergyman, nor Mr. Dundas as the landlord, had held out a finger to the new-comer, not to speak of a hand; while all regarded his presence at North Aston as rather a liberty than otherwise. Nevertheless, as time would show, though he had come there without purpose and lived among the people without interest, he would not be found without his uses, and one at least of the threads making up the skein of life at North Aston would be placed in his hands.
As Leam came to the side both Edgar Harrowby and Alick Corfield turned to greet her, the usually sad face of the curate, already brightened by fresh air and exercise, brighter still at seeing her, the handsome head of the squire held a little higher as his figure involuntarily straightened and he put out his best powers in her honor. But Alick’s shambling legs carried him fastest, and he was first at the edge, the neighborhood looking on, prepared to build a Tower of Babel heaven high on the foundation of a single brick. Leam Dundas had not yet been fitted with her hypothetical mate, and people wanted to see to whom they were to give her.
“Oh, come on with me!” cried Alick as soon as he came up, speaking with the unconscious familiarity of gladness at the advent for which he had watched so long. He held out his arm to Leam crooked awkwardly at the elbow.
“No,” said Leam a little shortly.
She always stiffened when Alick spoke to her before folk with anything like intimacy in his manner. He was her good friend, granted, and she liked him in a way and respected him in a way, though he was still too much after the pattern of her former slave and dog to gain her best esteem. She was one of those women who are arbitrary and disdainful to masculine weakness, and require to be absolutely dominated by men if they are to respect them as men like to be respected by women, and as—pace the Shriekers—the true woman likes to respect men. And Alick, though he had her in his hands and might destroy her at a word—clergyman, too, as he was, and thus possessing the key to higher things than she knew—was always so humble, so subservient, he made her feel as if she was his superior—not, as it should have been, that he was hers. In consequence, girl-like, proud and shy, she treated him with more disdain than she ought to have done, and used the power which he himself gave her without much consideration as to its effect. Besides, she did not wish to let people think he knew too much of her. With the nervous fancy of youth, ever believing itself to be transparent and understood all through, she imagined it would be seen that he had the right to speak to her familiarly—that he had her in his hand to destroy her at a word if so minded. Wherefore she said “No” shortly, and turned away her eyes as her protest against his glad face, crooked elbow and eager offer.
“I will not let you fall, and it is very jolly,” cried Alick cheerily, more like the boyish Alick of former days than the ascetic young curate of modern times.
“I do not like it,” said Leam.
Alick’s countenance fell; and when his face, always long, became longer still, with a congealed-looking skin, sad, red-lidded eyes and a hanging under lip, it was not lovely. Indeed, according to the miserable fatality which so often makes the spiritually best the physically worst—like the gods whom the Athenians enclosed in outer cases of satyrs and hideous masks of misshapen men—Alick’s face was never lovely. But his soul? If that could have been seen, the old carved parable of the Greeks would have been justified.
“Nonsense, Leam! Why cannot you do as others do?” cried Mr. Dundas.
He wanted to get rid of her for a while, and he was not unwilling that Alick, whose affection he suspected, should rid him of her for ever if he cared to saddle himself for life with such an uncomfortable companion.
“I do not like it,” repeated Leam.
“Nonsense!” said her father again. “Other girls are on. Why should you not join them? I see Adelaide Birkett and the Fairbairns. Why not go to them with Alick?”
“It looks silly balancing one’s self on the edge of a knife. And I should fall,” said Leam.
“No, you shall not fall,” Alick pleaded. “I will undertake that you shall not.”
His arm was still held out, always awkwardly crooked.
Leam lifted her eyes. “No,” she said with her old calm decision, and moved away. Four years ago she would have supplemented her refusal by the words, “You are stupid. You tease me,” Now she contented herself with action and accent.
Alick, very sorry, moist-eyed from disappointment, but not caring to stand there and get chilled—for our good Alick was a little afraid of cold, after the manner of mothers’ sons in general—skated off again to keep up his circulation, his knees bent, his chin forward, his arms swinging as balance-weights to his long body, the ends of his white woolen comforter flying behind him, and his legs running anywhere, the clumsiest and most ungraceful skater on the Broad. All the same, he never fell, and he went faster than even Edgar in his perfection of manly elegance.
Edgar had watched the whole of this little scene between Leam and Alick while seeming to be occupied only in executing his spread eagles and outside curves to perfection, and it was no secret to him what it meant. The demon of masculine vanity, never far off where a pretty woman was concerned, entered and took possession of him. He would succeed where Alick Corfield had failed, and Leam, who refused her old friend, should gratify her new. He had been guiding Adelaide over the ice, but she was rather too stiff in her movements, not sufficiently pliant nor yielding to be a very pleasant skating companion. And he had been pushing Josephine along the slide, but Joseph was too stout and short-breathed to be an ideal convoy; also he had been racing and half romping with the Fairbairn girls, who slipped and tumbled and laughed and screamed—more hoydenish than he thought pleasing; but now he intended to reward himself with Leam, whose action he was sure would be all that was delightful, even though unaccustomed, and who would look so well on his arm. Her slight and supple figure against his breadth and height and sense of solidity and strength, her dark hair and his beard of tawny brown, her large dark eyes and his of true Saxon blue, her southern face, oval in shape, cream-colored in tint, and his, square, open, ruddy, Scandinavian,—yes, they would make a splendid pair by their very contrast; and Edgar, narrowing his ambition to his circumstances, was quietly resolved to win the day over Alick Corfield by inducing Leam to cross the Broad with him after she had so manifestly refused her old friend. It was but a small object of ambition, but we must do what we can, thought Edgar; and it is the best wisdom to content ourselves with mice when we have no lions to destroy. He did not, however, rush up to her with Alick’s tactless precipitancy. He waited just long enough for her to desire, and not so long as to disappoint; then, speaking to Adelaide by the way, and giving her and Josephine each a helping hand, he came in a series of clean, showy curves to where Leam and her father were standing.
Leam was glad to meet again this handsome man who had seen so much and who talked so well. He was something different from the rest, and so far superior to them all. But, not being one of those instinctive girls who yield without pressure and fall in love at first sight, there were no flushings nor palpitations as Edgar came up; only a grave little smile stole half timidly over her face, and she forgot that he had insulted her mother’s country by calling her the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
“Do you skate, Miss Dundas?” asked Edgar after a while, during which he had been talking of different matters, beginning with the weather, that camel of English conversation, and ending with the state of the ice and the chances of a thaw. His five minutes of commonplaces seemed an eternity to Adelaide, watching them jealously from a distance.
“No,” said Leam.
“I want her to learn; and this is a good opportunity,” put in her father.
“You are right. It is a capital exercise and a graceful accomplishment,” said Edgar. “I think a woman never looks better than when she is skating,” he added carelessly.
“I think she looks silly,” said Leam.
He laughed. “That is because you are not English pur sang,” he cried gayly. “If you had only the brave old Norse blood in you, you would take to the frost and ice like second nature.”
“No, I am not English pur sang,” answered Leam gravely. “I am more than half Spanish,” a little proudly.
“Hang it all, you can’t make it more than half!” said her father testily.
“And that makes such a splendid combination,” said Edgar, slightly lowering his voice as, ignoring his remark, he turned away from Mr. Dundas and gave himself wholly to Leam. “Spanish for art and poetry and all the fervid beauty of the South—English for the courage, the hardihood, the energy of the North. You ought to cultivate the characteristics of both nationalities, Miss Dundas,” in a louder tone; “and to do justice to one of them you ought to learn to skate.”
“That’s right, Edgar; so I say,” cried Mr. Dundas, who had heard only the last part.
“I cannot learn,” said Leam; but her face became strangely flushed, and she felt her resolution growing limp as her cheeks grew red.
“Yes, you can. I could teach you in half an hour,” cried Edgar, pulling down his coat-cuffs with an air.
“Go, Leam: let Major Harrowby give you a lesson,” said her father. “Perhaps he is a better teacher than that shambling-looking Alick. Go, child.”
“Shall I?” asked Edgar. “At least let me assist you to cross the ice, if without skates at first.”
He held out his hand.
“I shall fall,” objected reluctant Leam.
“No, you shall not. I will answer for that. Come. Will you not trust me?” This last phrase was said half tenderly, half with an offended kind of remonstrance, and he was still holding out his hand.
“Go, Leam,” urged her father.
“It is silly, and I shall fall,” repeated Leam.
Nevertheless, she put her hand in Edgar’s, and he took her on his arm in triumph.
At first her steps were slow and timid; but as her feet grew more accustomed to the unusual ground, as she gained more confidence in the strong arm that held her like a bar of iron, as her youth began to assert itself in the physical pleasure of the fresh air and the gliding movement, she lost her shyness and timidity, and she found herself almost laughing—she, who never laughed and only so rarely smiled.
“You like it?” he asked, looking down on her with a man’s admiration for a pretty woman marked in every line and feature.
“Yes, so much!” she answered, her usual reserved, self-centred manner for the moment lost.
“Now you will know how to trust me in future,” he said not very loudly.
She looked up to him, carrying her eyes right into his. “Yes, I will,” she answered simply.
At this moment Alick joined them, and Leam suddenly lost her new-found joy.
“I am glad you have come on at last,” said her faithful dog, effacing himself and his disappointment with an effort.
“They made me,” Leam replied.
“I hope not against your will and not to your displeasure,” said Edgar, still looking down into her face with the man’s admiration of a woman’s beauty so strongly marked in his own.
“No,” she answered: “I have liked it.”
“Let us take her between us, major, and give her a good spin,” said Alick, grasping the upper part of her arm uncomfortably.
Edgar slightly pressed the hand he held crosswise. “Would you like to double your protectors?” he asked. “Shall I share my office?”
“No,” said Leam. “I like best to be with one person only.”
“And possession being the nine points, let us go on,” laughed Edgar, whirling her away. “By the by, would you have preferred my giving you to Mr. Corfield as ’the one person only’?” he asked with affected doubt, making pretence of wishing to know her mind. He was skating rapidly now. It was as good as flying to Leam, and she was happy and very grateful.
“I would rather be with you,” she answered.
“Thanks!” said Edgar, and smiled.
“He is awkward, and you are not,” continued Leam, anxious to explain. “But I like him very much. He is good and kind; and he cannot help being awkward, can he?”
“No,” said Edgar coldly. “So you like him very much, do you?”
“Very much,” repeated Leam with loyal emphasis, “He has always been my friend here.”
“I hope for the future that I may be included in that sacred place,” said Edgar after a pause.
Leam looked at him slowly, fixedly. “You will never be so good to me as he is,” she answered.
It was the man’s heart that beat now, the man’s cheek that flushed. Who could keep his pulses still when those eyes were turned to his with, as it seemed, such maddening meaning? “I will try,” he said; and from that moment the die was cast. Edgar put himself in competition with Alick: he lowered his pride to such a rivalry as this, and threw his whole energies into the determination to surpass and supplant a man for whom even the least personable of his own sex need have had no fear.
He kept Leam for a long time after this, laying ground-lines for the future; forgetting Adelaide and the suitability which had hitherto been such an important factor in his calculations; forgetting his horror of Pepita, whose daughter Leam was, and his contempt for weak, fusionless Mr. Dundas, who was her father; forgetting the conventional demands of his class, intolerant of foreign blood; forgetting all but the words which said that Alick was her best friend here, and doubted his (Edgar’s) ever being so good to her as that other had been. It was on his heart now to convince her that he could be as good to her as Alick, and, if she would allow him, a great deal better. At last he slackened, and pulled up at the group of which the Fairbairn girls and Adelaide Birkett were the most conspicuous members.
“What a long skate you have had!” said Susy Fairbairn ruefully, for all that she was a good-tempered girl and not disposed to measure her neighbor’s wheat by her own bushel. But this was a special matter; for Edgar Harrowby was the pride of the place, and they took count of his doings as of their local prince, and envied the lucky queen of the hour bitterly or sadly according to the mood and the person.
“It was the first time I had tried,” said Leam, all aglow with the unwonted exercise and unusual excitement.
“I suppose you began by saying you could not and would not, and then did more than any one else?” said Adelaide in an acrid voice, veiling a very displeased face with a very unpleasant smile; but the veil was too transparent and showed the displeasure with palpable plainness.
Leam looked at her in a half-surprised way. Jealousy was a passion of which she was wholly ignorant, and she did not understand the key-note. She knew nothing of the unspoken affair between Edgar and the rector’s daughter, and could not read between the lines. Why was Adelaide cross because she had been a long time upon the ice? Did it hurt her? They had not been near her—not interfered with her in any way: why should she be vexed that they, Major Harrowby and herself, had been enjoying themselves? So she thought, gazing at Adelaide with the serious, searching look which always irritated that young lady, and at this moment almost unbearably.
“I wonder they did not teach you at school that it was rude to stare as you do, Leam,” she cried with impolitic haste and bitterness. “What are you looking at? Am I changing into a monster, or what?”
“I am looking at you because you are so cross about nothing,” answered Leam gravely. “What does it matter to any one if I have been on the ice long or no? Why should you be angry?” “Angry!” said Adelaide with supreme disdain. “I am not sufficiently interested in what you do, Leam, to be angry or cross, as you call it. I confess I do not like affectation: that is all.”
“Neither do I like affectation,” returned Leam. “People should say what they feel.”
“Indeed! That might not always be agreeable,” said Adelaide with her most sarcastic air. “Perhaps it is as well that the laws of politeness keep one’s mouth shut at times, and that we do not say what we feel.”
“It would be better,” insisted Leam.
“I wonder if you would say so were I to tell you what I thought of you now?” Adelaide replied, measuring her scornfully with her eyes.
“Why should you not? What have I done to be ashamed of?” Leam asked.
“And you call yourself natural and not affected!” Adelaide cried, turning away abruptly.—“How wrong,” she said in a low voice to Edgar, “turning the head of such a silly child as this!”
Edgar laughed. The vein of cruelty traversing his nature made him find more amusement than chagrin in Adelaide’s patent jealousy: he thought she was silly, and he was rather amazed at her want of dignity; still, it was amusing, and he enjoyed it as so much fun.
But when he laughed Leam’s discomfiture was complete. “I am sorry I came on the ice at all,” she said with a mixture of her old pride and new softness that made her infinitely lovely, the proud little head held high, but the beautiful eyes dewy. “I have offended every one, and I do not know why.” Just then Alick came rambling by. She held out her hand to him. Here at least was her friend and faithful follower. He would not jeer at her nor laugh, nor yet look cross and angry, as if she had done wrong. “Take me to papa,” she said superbly, making as if to withdraw her other hand from Edgar.
Alick’s homely face brightened like the morning. “Certainly,” he said.
“Certainly not,” flashed Edgar proudly, taking both her hands in his crosswise and grasping them even more firmly than before. “You are in my charge, Miss Dundas, and I can give you up to no one else—not even by your own desire.”
Adelaide’s slight cast became an unmistakable squint; the Fairbairn girls fluttered, half frightened at the chance of a fracas; Alick looked irresolute; Edgar looked haughty and displeased; Leam tragic and proud, partly bewildered, partly distressed.
Then Edgar cut the whole thing short by taking her away in silence, but like a whirlwind, saying, when half over the ground and well out of hearing, “What have I done to you, Miss Dundas, that you should try to throw me over like that?”
“You laughed at me,” said Leam.
“Laughed at you? You are dreaming.”
“You did,” she persisted.
“Pardon me: I laughed because my little friend Adelaide was so cross at your skating. It was fun to see her so angry.”
“I saw no fun in it,” Leam returned. “I only saw that she was angry with me, and impertinent, and that then you laughed at me.”
“I swear to you I did not,” cried Edgar earnestly. “Will you believe me? Tell me, Miss Dundas, that you exonerate me from such a charge. Tell me that you are sure I did not laugh at you.”
Leam looked at him with her large luminous eyes serious, questioning. “If you say so, I must believe you,” she answered slowly, “but I thought you did.”
“If you could read my heart, you would know I did not,” he said emphatically.
They were close on the bank now, where Mr. Dundas was walking with the rector.
“Say you believe me,” Edgar almost whispered in his rich musical voice, so sweet and tender. “Say it, I beseech you! You do not know how I shall suffer else.”
She looked at him again. “I do,” she said in the manner of a surrender, the grave little smile which was her most eloquent expression of pleasure stealing over her face.
“Thank you,” said Edgar: “now you have made me happy.”
“I do not understand why,” she answered with serious simplicity.
“Perhaps you will some day,” he replied as her father came down to receive her, rather more content with her than he usually was, seeing that Edgar Harrowby—Major Harrowby, the possessor of the Hill and some thousands a year—had singled her out for his special attention, and had made a picture on the ice almost as pretty as an illustrated weekly.
But Edgar, not wishing to go too far in the way of provocation, nor to burn his boats behind him before he had decided on his settlement, skated off to Adelaide so soon as he had deposited Leam, and by a few judicious praises and well-administered tendernesses of voice and look succeeded in bringing her back to her normal condition of quiescent resolve and satisfaction. Then, when she was her smiling self again—for if she had frowns for many others, she had always smiles for the Harrowbys as a race, and specially for Edgar as an individual—he said, in the manner of one wishing to know the truth of a thing, “What made you so savage to Miss Dundas just now?”
“I cannot bear her,” said Adelaide with energy.
“No, I see that you dislike her; but why?”
“I can hardly tell you: she has never done anything very bad, but I always feel as if she could, she is so silent, so reserved, so odd altogether.”
“A woman’s reason!” he laughed, “Dr. Fell over again.”
“It may be,” returned Adelaide coldly, “but I believe in my own instinctive dislikes. I felt the same kind of mistrust for that wretched woman who called herself Madame de Montfort, about whom papa and mamma and the whole place went mad. And after her death quite odd-enough stories came out to justify my doubts and condemn her faithful friends. Every one said she poisoned herself because she knew that she would be unmasked and she was afraid to face the ordeal. And her debts, I believe, were frightful; though it served that ridiculous Mr. Dundas right for marrying such a creature.”
“But granting that this woman was an adventuress, as you say, what has that to do with Miss Dundas?”
“Nothing, of course: I only mentioned her to show you that I have some accuracy of judgment, and that when I say I dislike Leam Dundas my opinion ought to be taken as worth consideration.”
Adelaide said this quietly, in the well-bred but absolutely positive manner which she would have when they were married and she differed from him in opinion. It was the moral arbitrariness of the superior being, which, amusing now in the maiden, might become wearisome, not to say oppressive, in the wife.
“Well, I do not know her as you do, of course, but I cannot see why you should dislike her so much,” persisted Edgar.
“Trust me, some day it will be seen why,” she answered. “I feel confident that before long Leam will show herself in her true colors, and those will be black. I pity the man who will ever be her husband.”
Edgar laughed somewhat forcedly, then looked at Leam walking up the road alone, and thought that her husband would not need much pity for his state. Her beauty stood with him for moral qualities and intellectual graces. Given such a face as hers, such a figure, and all the rest was included. And when he thought of her eyes and the maddening way in which they looked into his; of the grave little smile, evanescent, delicate, subtle, the very aroma of a smile, so different from the coarse hilarity of your commonplace English girls; of the reticence and pride which gave such value to her smaller graces; of the enchanting look and accent which had accompanied her act of self-surrender just now—that acceptance of his word and renunciation of her own fancy which had put him in the place and given him the honor of a conqueror,—he accused Adelaide in his heart of prejudice and jealousy, and despised her for her littleness. In fact, he was nearer to loving Leam Dundas because of these strictures than he would have been had the rector’s daughter praised her; and Adelaide, usually so politic, had made a horribly bad move by her unguarded confession of distrust and dislike.
The whole episode, however, had been lost in its true meaning to all save one—that one the Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, who already knew what there was to be known of every family in the place, and who had the faculty of dovetailing parts into a whole characteristic of the born detective.
THE GREEN YULE.
The frost broke suddenly, and was succeeded by damp, close, unseasonable weather, continuing up to Christmas, and giving the “green yule” which the proverb says “makes a fat churchyard.” That proverb was justified sadly enough at North Aston, for typhus set in among the low-lying cottages, and, as in olden times, when jail-fever struck the lawyer at the bar and the judge on the bench in stern protest against the foulness they fostered, so now the sins of the wealthy landlords in suffering such cottages as these in the bottom to exist reacted on their own class, and the fever entered other dwellings beside those of the peasants.
Two of the gentry were struck down by it—Alick Corfield and the new occupant of Lionnet, that Mr. Gryce who never went to church, and who was assumed in consequence to have neither a soul to be saved by God nor a heart to be touched by man. And these were just the two who, according to the theory of the good or evil of a man’s deeds returned to him in kind, had the most reason to expect exemption. For Alick had spent his strength in visiting the sick as a faithful pastor should, and Mr. Gryce had taken them material help with royal abundance. Both together they had to pay the price of principle, always an expensive luxury, and never personally so safe a card to play in the game of life as selfishness. For virtue has not only to be contented with its own reward, as we constantly hear, but has to accept punishment for its good deeds, vice for the most part carrying off the blue ribbons and the gold medals, while poor virtue, shivering in the corner, gets fitted with the fool’s cap or is haled into the marketplace to be pelted in the pillory. As was seen now in North Aston.
The rector, who never went into an infected cottage nor suffered a parishioner to stand between the wind and his security, kept his portly strength and handsome flesh intact, but Alick nearly lost his life as the practical comment on his faithful ministry; and Mr. Gryce, who, if he did not carry spiritual manna wherewith to feed hungry souls, did take quinine and port wine, money and comforting substances generally, for half-starved aching bodies, was also laid hold of by that inexorable law which knows nothing about providential immunities from established consequences on account of the good motives of the actors. This would have been called heresy by the North Astonian families, who professed to trust themselves to superior care, but none the less used Condy’s Fluid as a means whereby the work of Providence might be rendered easier to it, nor disdained precipitate flight from the protection in which they all said dolefully they believed. But there is a wide difference between saying and doing, and men who are shocked by words of frank unbelief find faithless deeds both natural and in reason.
In spite, then, of that expressed trust in Providence which is part of the garniture of English respectability, a great fear fell on the North Aston gentry when these two of their own circle were attacked. The fever, while it had confined itself to the ill-drained, picturesque little cottages below, was lamentable enough, but not more than lamentable on the broad platform of a common humanity; and those who had lost nothing told those who had lost all that they must bear their cross with patience, seeing that it was the divine will that it should be so. Now, when the fiery epidemic had come upon the gentry face to face in their homes, it was a monster from which they must flee without delay, for no one knew whose house was safe, nor for how long his own might remain uninfected.
Mrs. Harrowby and her daughters went off to Cheltenham two days after Alick was announced as “down,” to find there the security of living which had failed them here. They were people of the highest respectability—people who are the very pith and marrow of English social virtue; but they had not been touched with the divine fire of self-sacrifice for humanity, and they had no desire to hush the groans of the afflicted if they thereby ran the risk of having to gnash their own teeth. They could do no good at home. As Mrs. Harrowby said, as one propounding a self-evident paradox, how could they go and see the sick or help to nurse ploughmen and their children? They would only catch the fever themselves, and so spread it still farther. And every one knows what a wicked thing that is to do. Cook had orders to supply a certain amount of soup and wine when asked for, which was more to the purpose than any mere sentimental kindness, of no use to the one and highly dangerous to the other; and as Edgar had a great deal to do in the house and stables, it was as well, she said with the air of one undergoing something disagreeable for high principles, to get out of his way and leave him to his bricks and mortar undisturbed. Gentlemen, she said, as the clamp holding all together, do not like to be interfered with in their own domain. That fever in the bottom was such an admirable lever of womanly good sense! So they went and enjoyed themselves at Cheltenham as much as it was in the Harrowby nature to do, and even Josephine’s kind heart consoled itself in the Pump-room while their miserable tenants at home sickened and died as comfortably as circumstances would allow.
The Fairbairns, too, found themselves obliged to pay a long-promised visit to London now on the instant, and swept out of the place with even more than their characteristic promptitude; and the rector would have given up his charge to a substitute if he could. But floating clerical labor was just then scarce, and he could not find any one to take his place in the Valley of the Shadow, though he offered the liberal terms which are dictated by fear. He sent away his wife and daughter, but he himself was bound to his post, and had to make the best of the bad bit of cord that held him. He used to say with his grand manner of martyrdom that, whatever he suffered, he must pull the laboring-oar to the end, and attend to the sheep committed to his charge. And he said it so often that he got at last to believe in his own devotion. All the same, that laboring-oar of his pulled nothing heavier than a cock-boat, and in waters no stormier than a duck-pond; and when his sheep had the rot he was too delicate about the hands to meddle with them. He preached to the living and he buried the dead surrounded by all the protective appliances that science has devised or money can supply. When the epidemic was over he too talked of Providence and his trust therein, and how he had been mercifully spared as his reward.
Mrs. Birkett’s native indolence would have kept her at home, well fumigated and isolated, even in such a strait of fear and danger as this in which they all were, and Adelaide was racked with torment at leaving Leam unwatched and unhindered in the same place as Edgar; yet, being more afraid of the fever than even of a potential rival, she agreed with her father that in justice to themselves they ought to go now at once; and Pace, who was to remain to take care of the rector, packed up their best dresses, and sent them off with Adelaide’s maid shared between them. She prophesied, however, that their things would all be spoiled before they returned, and then they would know her value. As Mr. Dundas elected to remain at home, not being afraid of infection and being tired of travel, Mrs. Birkett insisted on taking little Fina with her. This was her contribution to the sum of philanthropy and self-sacrifice in the world, and it was not despicable; for Fina was restless and only six years of age, and Mrs. Birkett was indolent and soon tired.
Thus, the whole society of the place was reduced now to the rector, Mr. Dundas and Leam, with Edgar Harrowby left alone at the Hill. The Corfields did not count, because of Alick’s illness, by which they were put in quarantine; and if Mr. Gryce at Lionnet had not been the cipher he was, his illness too would have disbarred him.
There was nothing of the saint by nature nor of the instinctive philanthropist about Leam. She was too concentrated for general benevolence, and men and women whom she did not know were little more than symbols to her. When she loved it was with her whole heart, her whole being: failing this kind of love, she had but weak affections and no curiosity, in which much of our ordinary charity consists. When the servants told her of such and such distressing circumstances, she was sorry because they were sorry, not because she realized in her own emotions the troubles she did not share or see. When prompted she sent improper things in the way of diet and useless things in the way of dress for the benefit of the poor fever patients—and she sent generously—but it never occurred to her as possible that she should go to see them in their own homes. When we read of a cyclone in China which has killed half a hundred mandarins and a small army of coolies, we realize the sorrow of the survivors no more than we realize the distress of a disturbed ant-hill; and Leam’s attitude of mind toward the poor of her native village was precisely the same as ours toward the Chinese killed in a cyclone or the ants murdered in their hill.
But she went daily to Steel’s Corner, because she knew the Corfields and in her own way liked Alick. Mrs. Corfield assured her there was no danger, not a particle, with her free use of disinfectants and her cunning devices of ventilation. And Leam believed her, and acted on her belief, which gave her a false look of heroism and devotion that won the heart of poor Pepita’s “crooked stick” for ever. She thought it so good of the girl, so brave and unselfish; and you could scarcely have expected such nice feeling from Leam, now could you? she used to ask her husband half a dozen times a day, ringing the changes on Leam’s good qualities as no one in the place had ever rung them before, and disturbing the poor doctor in his calculations on the varying strength of henbane and aconite till he wished that Leam Dundas had never been born. Mrs. Corfield was just as wrong in ascribing heroic qualities to the girl for her daily visits to ask after Alick as she had been when she had credited her with moral faults because of her intellectual ignorance. She was not afraid because she knew nothing about infection, and had therefore the boldness of ignorance, and she went daily to ask after Alick because she somehow slipped into the groove of doing so; and a groove was a great thing to conservative Leam. Nevertheless, she was really concerned at the illness of her first North Astonian friend, and wished that he would soon get well. She never thought that if he died she would be rid of the only person who knew her deadly secret. Leam was not one who would care to buy her own safety at the price of another’s destruction; and, more than this, she was not afraid that Alick would betray her.
This, then, was the condition of things at North Aston at this moment: the villagers dying of fever in the bottom, the families seeking safety in flight, Leam going daily to Steel’s Corner to ask after Alick and sit for precisely half an hour with Mrs. Corfield, and Edgar not so much taken up with bricks and mortar as not to understand times and habits, and therefore, through that understanding, seeing her for some part of every day. And the more he saw of her the more he yearned to see, and the stronger grew her strange fascination over him. To him, at least, the fever had not been an unmitigated evil; and though he was sometimes inclined to quarrel with the fact that Leam went daily to Steel’s Corner to inquire after Alick Corfield, yet, as he got the grain and Alick only the husk, he submitted to the process by which the best was winnowed to his side. As the gain of that winnowing process became more evident he grew philosophically convinced that nothing is so charming in a woman as faithful friendship for a sick man, and that sitting daily for half an hour, always at exactly the same time, with an afflicted mother is the most delightful act of charity to be imagined.
IN THE BALANCE.
Riding was one of the accomplishments brought by Leam from school, though she had never been able to thoroughly conquer either her timidity or her reluctance. Her childish days of inaction and inclusion had left their mark on her for life, and, moreover, she was not of the race or kind whence, by any process of education possible, could have been evolved a girl of the florid, fearless, energetic kind usually held as the type of the English maiden. Hence she was never quite happy on horseback, and always wondered how it was that people could be enthusiastic about riding. Nevertheless, she had learnt to sit with grace, if not with confidence, and she was too proud to show the discomfort she felt. Her father had bought for her use the showiest chestnut to be had in the market; and as he wished her to ride sometimes with him, if oftener with only the groom at her heels, and as, again, she had honestly set herself to please him, she used to mount her Red Coat, as she called her beast, punctually every other day, and carry her dislike to the exercise as the penance it was fitting she should perform. And besides all this, that devouring fever in her blood, that oppressive consciousness rather than active remembrance, lying always at the back of her life, was best soothed by long hours alone in the open air. For when she had only the groom behind her, Leam—to whom all men were as yet powers undesignated, and a man of low degree a mere animal that made intelligible sounds on occasions and was of a little more use than a dog—forgot him altogether, and was as much alone as if he had not been there.
Once or twice before the hegira of the gentry she had chanced to meet Major Harrowby in her rides, and he had turned with her and accompanied her, which was half a pain to’ Leam and half a pleasure. The pain was connected with her reins and her stirrups, her saddle and the girths, the restless way in which the chestnut moved his ears, the discomposing toss of his small impatient head, the snorts which frightened her as the heralds of an outbreak, and his inclination to dance sideways into the hedge rather than walk discreetly in the middle of the road, whereby her seat was disturbed and her courage tried, she all the while not liking to show that she was ill at ease. The pleasure was personal, arising from the strange sense of protection that she felt in Edgar’s society and the charming way in which he talked to her. He had seen a great deal, and he had a facile tongue, and between fact and color, memory and make-up, his stories were delightful. Also, after the manner of men who seek to influence a young girl’s mind and heart, he lent her books to read, and he marked his favorite passages, which he discussed afterward. They were not passages of abstract thought and impersonal sentiment, like the penciled notes in Alick Corfield’s literary loans, but scenes of passion or of pathos, going straight to the heart of youth, which feels rather than reflects, or descriptions of places which were equal to pictures of human life. Under Alick’s guidance she had fallen asleep over Wordsworth—under Edgar’s she dreamed beneath the stars over Byron, and had heartaches without knowing why.
If they had met sometimes, and by chance, before the families went away, they met now continually, and not by chance. But as Edgar’s passion and reason were not in accord, he restrained himself, for him marvelously, and neither made love to her in earnest nor flirted with her in jest. Indeed, Leam was too intense to be approached at any time with levity. As well dress the Tragic Muse in the costume of a Watteau shepherdess as ply Leam Dundas with the pretty follies found so useful with other women. She did not understand them, and it seemed useless to try to make her. If Edgar paid her any of the trivial compliments always on his lips for women, Leam used to look at him with her serious eyes and ask him how could he possibly know what she was like—he, who scarcely knew her at all. If he praised her beauty, she used to turn away her head offended and tell him he was rude. He felt as if he could never touch her, never hold her: his ways were not as hers; and if her fascination for him increased, so did his trouble.
He was in doubt on both sides—for her and for himself. He could not read that silent, irresponsive nature nor measure his influence over her. By no blushes when they met, no girlish poutings when he kept away, by no covert reproaches, no ill-concealed gladness, no tremors and no consciousness could he gain the smallest clew to guide him. She was always the same—grave, gentle, laconic, self-possessed. But who that looked into her eyes could fail to see underneath her Spanish pride and more than Oriental reserve that fund of passion lying hidden like the waters of an artesian well, waiting only to be brought to the surface? He had not yet brought that hidden treasure into the light of the sun and of love, and he wondered if ever he should. And if he should, would it be for happiness? Leam was the kind of girl to love madly under the orange trees and myrtles, to break one’s heart for when brothers interposed in the moonlight with rapiers and daggers and caught her away for conventual discipline or for marriage with the don; but as the mistress of an English home, the every-day wife of an English squire with a character to keep up and an example to set, was she fit for that? She was so quaint, so original, there were such depths of passionate thought and feeling side by side with such strange shallows of social and intellectual ignorance—though reticent she was so direct, though tenacious so simple, her love, if difficult to win, had such marvelous vitality when won—that he felt as if she spoke a language sweeter and purer in many of its tones than the current speech of society, but a language with which neither his own people nor that society would ever be familiar.
Amorous and easily impressed as he was, her beauty drew him with its subtle charm, but his doubt and her pride interposed barriers which even he dared not disregard; and at the end of two months he was no nearer than at the beginning that understanding which he would have established with any other pretty woman in less than a week. And he was no surer of himself and what he did really desire. Yet, accustomed as he was to loves as easily won as the gathering of a flower by the wayside, and to the knowledge that Adelaide Birkett, his social match in all things, was ready to pick up the handkerchief when he should think fit to throw it, this very doubt both of himself and Leam made half the interest if all the perplexity of the situation. He knew, as well as he knew that the Corinthian shaft should bear the Corinthian capital, if it was Leam whom he loved it was Adelaide whom he ought to marry. She would carry incense to the gods of British respectability as a squire’s lady should, doing nothing that should not be done and leaving as little undone that should be done. She would preside at the Hill dinners with grace and join the meet at the coverside with punctuality; she would dress as became her position, but neither extravagantly nor questionably, and she would be more likely to stint than to squander; she would live as a polite Christian should, in the odor of genteel righteousness, not a fibre laid cross to the conventional grain, not a note out of tune with the orthodox chord. Yes, it was the rector’s daughter whom he ought to marry, but it was Pepita’s whom he loved. Yet how would things go with such a perplexing iconoclast at the head of affairs? Imagine the feelings of an English squire, M.H. of his county, loving dogs and horses as some women love children, and regarding poaching and vulpicide as crimes almost as bad as murder—imagine his feelings when his beautiful wife, grave and simple, should say at a hunt-dinner, “I do not like riding. I think hunting stupid and cruel: an army of men in red coats after a poor little hare—it is horrid! I think poaching quite right. God gave beasts and birds to us all alike, and your preserves are robberies. I would like to save all the foxes, and I hate the dogs when they catch them;” for be sure she would never learn to call them hounds. What would he feel? It would be an incongruous kind of thing altogether, Edgar used to think when meditating on life as seen through the curling clouds of his cigar.
But he loved her—he loved her: daily with more passion, because daily holding a stronger check on himself, and so accumulating by concentration. It was the old combat between love and reason, personal desires and social feelings, and as yet it was undecided which side would win. Now it was Adelaide and her exact suitability for her part, when he would avoid Leam Dundas for days; now it was Leam and his fervid love for her, his passion of doubt, his fever of longing, when he would all but commit himself and tempt the fortune of the future irrevocably.
One day, during this, time of sickness in the village and Edgar’s lonely residence at the Hill, Leam was riding along the Green Lanes, a pretty bit of quiet country, when she heard the well-known hoofs thundering rapidly behind her, and in due time Major Harrowby drew rein at her side. “I saw you from the Sherrington road,” he said, his eyes kindling with pleasure at the meeting.
Leam smiled, that pretty little fluttering smile which was so peculiarly her own, playing like a flicker of tender sunshine over her face, but she felt gladder than she showed. It was not her way to flourish her feelings like flags in the face of men. Her reticence was part of her dislike to noise and glare. “I am glad to see you,” she returned quietly, her eyes raised for a moment to his.
“I sometimes fear I annoy you by joining you so often,” said Edgar.
“No, you do not annoy me,” Leam answered.
“It is a pleasure to know at least as much as that,” he returned with a forced laugh.
“Yes? But why should you think that you annoy me?” she asked.
“Oh, perhaps you see too much of me, and so get tired of me. The thing is possible,” he said, stroking his horse’s ears.
Leam looked at him as she had looked before, but this time without the smile. “Are you tired of me that you say so?” she asked.
“No, no, no! How can you say such a thing—how dream it?” cried Edgar. “How could I be tired of you? Why, you are the sunshine of my life, the one thing I “—he checked himself—“I look forward to meeting,” he added awkwardly.
“Then why should I be tired of you?” she returned. “You are kind to me; you tell me things I do not know; and,” with maddening unconsciousness of how her words might be taken, “there is no one else.”
This was the nearest approach to a compliment that Leam had ever made. She meant simply that, as there was no one else to tire her, how could her pleasant friend Major Harrowby possibly do so? But Edgar naturally took her words awry. “And if there were anyone else I suppose I should be nowhere? My part has not often been that of a pis aller,” with a deep flush of displeasure.
“Why do you say that?” she asked in a slight tone of surprise. “You would be always where you are.”
“With you?”
Her face asked his meaning.
“I mean, would you always hold me as much your friend, always care for me as much as you do now—if, indeed, you care for me at all—if any one else was here?” he explained.
Leam turned her troubled eyes to the ground. “I do not change like the wind,” she answered, wishing he would not talk of her at all.
“No, I do not think you do or would,” returned Edgar, bending his head nearer to hers as he drew his horse closer. “I should think that once loved would be always loved with you, Miss Dundas?” He said this in a low voice that slightly trembled.
She was silent. She had a consciousness of unknown dangers, sweet and perilous, closing around her—dangers which she must avoid she scarcely knew how, only vaguely conscious as she was that they were about. Then she said, with an effort, “I do not like myself talked of. It does not matter what I am.”
“To me everything!” cried Edgar impulsively.
“You say what you do not mean,” returned Leam. “I am not your sister; how, then, should it matter?”
Her grave simplicity was more seductive to him than the most coquettish wiles would have been. She was so entirely at sea in the art of love-making that her very ignorance provoked a more explicit declaration. “Are there only sisters in the world?” he asked passionately, yet angry with himself for skirting so near to the edge of peril.
“No: there are mothers,” said Leam.
Edgar caught his breath, but again checked himself just in time to prevent the words “and wives,” that rose to his lips. “And friends,” he substituted, with evident constraint and as awkwardly as before. It was not often that a woman had been able to disconcert Edgar Harrowby so strangely as did this ignorant and innocent half-breed Spanish girl.
“And friends,” repeated Leam. “But they are not much.”
“Alick Corfield? He is my good friend,” she answered quietly.
“Yes, I know how much you like him.” An understanding ear would have caught the sneering undertone in these words.
“Yes, I like him,” responded Leam with unmoved gravity.
“And you are sorry that he is ill—very sorry, awfully sorry?”
“I am sorry.”
“Would you be as pained if I were ill? and would you come every day to the Hill to ask after me, as you go to Steel’s Corner to ask after him?”
“I would be pained if you were ill, but I would not go to the Hill every day,” said Leam.
“No? Why this unfair preference?” he asked.
“Because I am not afraid of Mrs. Corfield,” she answered.
“And you are of my mother?”
“Yes. She is severe.”
“It is severe in you to say so,” said Edgar gently.
“No,” said Leam with her proud air. “It is true.”
“Then you would not like to be my mother’s daughter?” asked Edgar, both inflamed and troubled.
Leam looked him straight in the face, utterly unconscious of his secret meaning. “No,” she answered, her head held high, her dark eyes proud and fixed, and her small mouth resolute, almost hard. “I would like to be no one’s daughter but mamma’s.”
“I do love your fidelity,” cried Edgar with a burst of admiration. “You are the most loyal girl I know.”
She turned pale: her head drooped. “Let us talk of something else,” she said in an altered voice. “Myself is displeasing to me.”
“But if it pleases me?”
“That is impossible,” said Leam. “How can it please you?”
Was it craft? was it indifference? or was it honest ignorance of the true motive of a man’s words and looks? Edgar pondered for a moment, but could come to no definite conclusion save rejection of that one hypothesis of craft. Leam was too savagely direct, too uncompromising, to be artful. No man who understood women only half so well as Edgar Harrowby understood them could have credited such a character as hers with deception.
He wavered, then, between the alternative of indifference or ignorance. If the one, he felt bound by self-respect to overcome it—that self-respect which a man of his temperament puts into his successes with women; if the other, he must enlighten it. “Does it not please you to talk of those you like?” he asked after a short pause.
“Yes,” said Leam, her face suddenly softening into tenderness as she thought of her mother; of whom Edgar did not think. “Talk to me of Spain and all that you did there.”
“And that would be of what you like?” he asked.
“Of what I love,” returned Leam in a low voice, her eyes lifted to his, soft and humid.
“How can I read you? What can I think? What do you want me to believe?” cried Edgar in strange trouble.
“What have I said?” she asked with grave surprise. “Why do you speak like this?”
“Are you playing with me, or do you want me to understand that you have made me happy?” he cried, his face, voice, bearing, all changed, all full of an unknown something that half allured and half frightened her.
She turned aside her head with her cold, proud, shrinking air. “I am not playing with you; and you are silly to say I have made you happy,” she said, shaking her reins lightly and quickening her chestnut’s uneasy pace; and Edgar, quickening the pace of his heavy bay, thought it wiser to let the moment pass, and so stand free and still wavering—in doubt and committed to nothing.
Thus the time wore on, with frequent meetings, always crowded with doubts and fears, hopes, joys, displeasures in a tangled heap together, till the drying winds of March set in and cleared off the last of the fever, which had by now worn itself away, and by degrees the things of North Aston went back to their normal condition. The families came into residence again, and save for the widow’s wail and the orphan’s cry in the desolated village below, life passed as it had always passed, and the strong did not spend their strength in bearing the burdens of the weak.
The greatest social event that had taken place in consequence of the epidemic was, that Mr. Dundas had made acquaintance with his new tenant at Lionnet. Full of painful memories for him as the place was, he could not let the poor fellow die, he said, with no Christian soul near him. As a landlord he felt that he owed this mark of humanity to one of whom, if nothing absolutely good was known, neither was there anything absolutely bad, save that negative misdemeanor of not coming to church. As this was not an unpardonable offence to a man who had traveled much if he had thought little, Mr. Dundas let his humanity get the upper hand without much difficulty. By which it came about that he and his new tenant became friends, as the phrase goes, and that thus another paragraph was added to the restricted page of life as North Aston knew it.
ONLY A DREAM.
Of all those who lived through the fever, poor Alick Corfield’s case had been the most desperate while it lasted. Mr. Gryce, his fellow-sufferer, had been up and about his usual work, extracting Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera for a month and more, while Alick was still in bed among ice-bags and Condy’s Fluid, and as bad as at the beginning—indeed, worse, having had a relapse which nothing but his wiry constitution, backed by his mother’s scientific nursing, could have pulled him through. Gradually the danger passed, and this time his convalescence was solid, and, though slow, uninterrupted. He began to creep about the house by the aid of sticks and arms, and he came down stairs for the first time on the day when the Harrowbys and Birketts returned home; but he remained in strict quarantine, and Steel’s Corner was scrupulously avoided by the neighbors as the local lazaretto which it would be sinful to invade. By all but Leam, who went daily to ask after the invalid, and to keep the mother company for exactly half an hour by the clock.
One day when she went on her usual errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the hall-door, “Alick will be glad to see you, my dear,” she called out, radiant with happiness, as the girl crossed the threshold. “We are in the drawing-room to-day, as brisk and bonny as a bird: such a treat for him, poor dear!”
“I am glad,” said Leam, who held a basket of early spring flowers in her hand. “Now you are happy.” Tears came into the poor mother’s haggard eyes. “Happy, child! You do not know what I feel,” she said with tremulous emotion. “Only a mother who has been so near to the loss of her dearest, so near to heartbreak and despair, as I have been, can know the blessed joy of the reprieve.”
“How you love him!” said Leam in a half whisper. “I loved mamma like that.”
“Yes, poor child! I remember,” said Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She forgot that at the time she had thought the girl’s love and despair, both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid. She met her now on the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of the contradiction.
“I thought I should have died too when she did. I wish I had,” said Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought to meet her mother’s face in the blue depths.
“My poor dear! it was terrible for you,” sighed the elder woman sympathetically. “But you must not always mourn, you know. There is a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after sorrow.”
“Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy,” said Leam.
“Why not?” answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way. “You are young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black round your eyes to-day. You have friends: I am sure all of us, from my husband downward, think a great deal of you. And Alick has always been your friend. Why should you not be happy?”
Leam put the question by. “Yes, you have always been kind to me,” she answered. “I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then. But I did not understand you as I do now. And how good Alick was! How sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!” Her beautiful face grew tender with the thought. She did really love Alick in her girlish, sisterly way.
Mrs. Corfield looked at her. “Have you never loved any one else as you loved your poor mother?” she asked.
Leam lifted her eyes. “Never,” she answered simply. “I have liked a few people since, but love as I loved mamma? No!”
“Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must give me a straightforward answer: Which do you like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby?” Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted to surprise the girl’s secret thought rather than have a deliberate answer.
“I like them differently,” began Leam without affectation. “Alick is so unlike Major Harrowby in every way. And then I have known him so long—since I was a mere child. I feel that I can say what I like to him: I always did. But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am—I don’t know: it is all different. I cannot say what I mean.” She hesitated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and said, “Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield? You should not.”
Mrs. Corfield sighed. If Edgar was undecided between his personal desires and conventional fitness, she was undecided between her longing to see Alick happy and her dislike to his being happy in any way but the one she should design for him. He had raved a good deal during his illness, and had said many mad things connected with Leam—always Leam; and since his convalescence his mother had seen clearly enough how his heart was toward her. His pleasure when he heard that she had been there, his childish delight in anything that she had brought for him, the feverishness with which he waited to hear her step, her voice from a distance, always demanding that the doors should be left open so that he might hear her,—all betrayed to his mother as plainly as confession would have done the real thoughts of his heart, and cast a trouble into her own whence she saw no present satisfactory issue. Though she was fond of Leam now, and grateful to her for her faithful visits during Alick’s illness, yet, just as Edgar doubted of her fitness as a wife for the master of the Hill, so did she doubt of her fitness as a daughter-in-law for Steel’s Corner. As a friend she was pleasant enough, with her quaint ways and pretty face; but as one of the Corfield family, bound to them for ever—what then would she be? But again, if Alick really loved her, she would not like to see him disappointed. So, what between her dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick’s unhappiness
It was pitiful to see the poor fellow. Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also ennobled by that almost saintly dignity which is given by illness, the first impression made on Leam was one of acute physical repulsion: the second only gave room to compassion. Fortunately, that little shudder of hers was unnoticed, and Alick saw only the beloved face, more beautiful to him than anything out of heaven, with its grave intensity of look that seemed so full of thought and feeling, turned to him—saw only those glorious eyes fixed once more straight on his—felt only the small hand which seemed to give him new life to touch lying clasped in his own, weak, wasted, whitened, like a dead hand for color against the warm olive of her skin. It was almost worth while to have been separated so long to have this joy of meeting; and he thought his pain and danger not too dearly bought by this exquisite pleasure of knowing that she had pitied him and cared for him.
He raised himself from his pillows as he took her small, warm, fibrous hand, and his pallid face brightened into a tearful smile. “Ah!” he said, drawing a deep breath, “I am so glad to see you again!”
“I am glad to see you too,” said Leam with a certain sudden embarrassment, she did not know why, but it came from something that she saw in his eyes and could not explain even to herself.
“Are you?” He pressed her hand, which he still held. “It does me good to hear you say so,” he replied.
“I have brought you some flowers,” then said Leam, a little coldly, drawing away her hand, which she hated to have either held or pressed.
He took them with a pleased smile. “Our pretty wild-flowers!” he said gratefully, burying his face in them, so cool and fresh and fragrant as they were. “They are like the giver,” he added after a pause, “only not so sweet.”
“Do you remember when I persisted to you there were no wild-flowers in England?” asked Leam, wishing that Alick would not pay her compliments.
“Do I remember? That was the first time I saw you,” cried Alick. “Of what else have I thought ever since?”
“You like wild-flowers and celandine, do you not?” asked poor Leam, desperately disturbed. “I found them in the wood as I came here.”
“And picked them for me?—up in the corner there by Barton’s? I know. And you went up the lane for them—for me?” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Leam.
“For me?” he asked again.
“Why, yes: for whom else could it have been?” answered Leam in the tone of grave rebuke he knew so well—the tone which always expressed, “You are stupid.”
Alick’s lip quivered. “You are so good,” he said.
“Am I?” asked Leam seriously.
Then something passed over her face, a kind of gray shadow of remembrance, and she dropped her eyes. Was she good? and could he think so?
A silence fell between them, and each knew of what the other was thinking; then Leam said suddenly, to break that terrible silence, which she felt was more betraying than even speech would have been, “I am sorry you have been so ill. How dreadfully ill you have been!”
“Yes,” he said, “I have been bad enough, I believe, but by God’s grace I have been spared.”
“It would have been more grace not to have let you get ill in the beginning,” said Leam gravely.
Alick looked distressed. Should he never Christianize this pagan? “Don’t say that, dear,” he remonstrated. “We must not call in question His will.”
“Things are things,” said Leam with her quiet positiveness. “If they are bad, they are bad, whoever sends them.”
“No. God cannot send us evil,” cried Alick.
“Then He does not send us disease or sorrow,” answered Leam. “If He does, it is silly to say they are good, or that He is kind to make us ill and wretched. I cannot tell stories. And all you people do.”
“Leam, you pain me so much when you talk like this. It is bad, dear—impious and unchristian. Ah! can I never bring you to the true way?” he cried with real pain.
“You cannot make me tell stories or talk nonsense because you say it is religious,” replied Leam, impervious and unconvinced. “I like better to tell the truth and call things by their right names.”
“And you cannot feel that we are little children walking in the dark and that we must accept by faith?” said Alick.
She shook her head, then answered with a certain tone of triumph in her voice, “Well, yes, it is the dark: so let it be the dark, and do not pretend you understand when you do not. Do not say God made you ill in one breath, and in another that He is kind. It is silly.”
“Now, my boy, don’t excite yourself,” said Mrs. Corfield, bustling into the room and noting how the thin cheek had flushed and how bright and feverish the hollow eyes of her invalid were looking. “You know the doctor says you are not to be excited or tired. It is the worst thing in the world for you.”
“I am neither, mother: don’t alarm yourself,” he answered; “but I must have a little talk with Leam. I have not seen her for so long. How long is it, mother?”
“Well, my dear, you have been ill for over ten weeks,” she said as she went to the window with a sudden gasp.
“Ten weeks gone out of my life!” he replied.
“We have all been sorry,” said Leam a little vaguely.
His eyes grew moist. He was weak and easily moved. “Were you very sorry?” he asked.
“Very,” she answered, for her quite warmly.
“Then you did not want me to die?” He said this with a yearning look, raising himself again on his elbow to meet her eyes more straightly.
“Want you to die?” she repeated in astonishment. “Why should I want you to die? I want you to get well and live.”
He took her hand again. “God bless you!” he said, and turned his face to the pillow to conceal that he was weeping.
Again that gray look of remembrance, passed over her face. She knew now what he had meant. “No,” she said slowly, “I do not want you to die. You are good, and would harm no one.”
After this visit Leam saw Alick whenever she called at the house, which, however, was not so often as heretofore, and week by week became still more seldom. Something was growing up in her heart against him that made his presence a discomfort. It was not fear nor moral dislike, but it was a personal distaste that threatened to become unconquerable. She hated to be with him; hated to see his face looking at her with such yearning tenderness as abashed her somehow and made her lower her eyes; hated his endeavors to convert her to an orthodox acceptance of mysteries she could not understand and of explanations she could not believe; hated his sadness, hated his joy: she only wished that he would go away and leave her alone. What did he mean? What did he want? He was changing from the blushing, awkward, subservient dog of his early youth, and from the still subservient if also more argumentative pastor of these later days alike, and she did not like the new Alick who was gradually creeping into the place of the old.
When Mrs. Corfield spoke of taking him to the sea for change of air, her heart bounded as if a weight had been suddenly removed, and she said, “Yes, he ought to go,” so warmly that the mother was surprised, wondering if she cared so much for him that the idea of his getting good elated her beyond herself and made her forget her usual reserve. She instinctively contrived not to see him alone now when she went to Steel’s Corner during his tedious convalescence, for the poor fellow mended but slowly, if surely. Either she had only a short time to stay, and so stood for a moment, making serious talk impossible, or she took little Fina with her, or maybe she entangled Mrs. Corfield in the conversation so that she should not leave them alone, the vague fear and distaste possessing her making her strangely rusee and on the alert. But one day she was caught. It had to come, and it was only a question of time. She knew that, as we know when our doom is upon us.
Leam had not intended to go in to-day, but Alick, who was in the garden rejoicing in the warmth and freshness of this tender April noontide, came to meet her at the second gate, and asked her to come and sit with him on the garden-seat, there where the budding lilacs began to show their bloom, and there where they sat on that fatal day when she had hidden the little phial in her hair and bade him tell her of flowers till she tired.
She hesitated, and was on the point of refusing, when he took her by the upper part of her arm as if to hold her. “Do,” he pleaded. “I want to say something to you.”
“I have no time to stay,” she answered, shrinking from his touch.
“Yes, yes, time enough for all I have to say,” he returned. “I beg you to come with me to-day, Leam—I beg it; and I do not often ask a favor of you.”
There was something in his manner that seemed to compel Leam to consent in spite of herself. True, he besought, but also he seemed almost to command; and if he did not command, then his earnestness was so strong that she was forced to yield to it. Trembling, but with her proud little head held straight—wondering what was coming, and vaguely conscious that whatever it was it would be pain—Leam let him take her to the garden-seat where the budding lilacs spoke of springtime freshness and summer beauty. Alick was trembling too, but from excitement, not from fear. He had made up his mind now, and when he had once resolved he was not wavering. He would ask her to share his life, accept his love, and he would thus take on himself half the burden of her sin. This was how he felt it. If he married her, knowing all that he knew, he would make himself the partner of her crime, because he would accept her past like her present—like her future; and thus he would be equally guilty with her before God. But he would trust to prayer and the Supreme Mercy to save her and him. He would carry no merits of devotion as his own claim, but he would have freed her of half her guilt, and he would be content to bear his own portion of punishment for this unfathomable gain. It was the man’s love, but also the soul’s passionate promise of sacrifice and redemption, that gave him boldness to plead, power to ask for a grace to which, had this deep stain of sin never tainted her, he would not have dared to aspire. But, as it was, his love was her greater safety, and what he gained in earthly joy he would lose in spiritual peace, while her partial forgiveness would be bought by the loss of his security of salvation. Not that she understood all this or ever should, but it gave him courage.
“When you first saw me, Leam, after my illness you said that you wanted me to live,” he began in a low voice, husky with emotion. “Do you mean this?”
“Yes,” she said, looking straight before her.
“Live for you?” he asked.
“For us all,” she answered.
“No, not for us all—for you,” he returned with insistence.
“That would be silly,” said Leam quietly. “I am not the only person in the world: you have your mother.”
“For my mother, perhaps; but for the world, nothing. You are the world to me,” said Alick. “Give me your love, and I care for nothing else. Tell me you will be my wife, and I can live then—live as nothing else can make me. Leam, can you love me, dear? I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. Will you be my wife?”
“Your wife!” cried Leam with an involuntary gesture of repulsion. “You are dreaming.”
“No, no: I am in full earnest. Tell me that you love me, Leam. Oh, I believe that you do. Surely I have not deceived myself so far. Why should you have come every day—every day, as you have done—if you do not love me? Yes, you do—I know you, do. Say so, Leam, my darling, my beloved, and put me out of my misery of suspense.”
“You are my good friend: I love you like a friend; but a wife—that is different,” faltered Leam.
“Yes, but it will come if you try,” pleaded Alick, shifting his point from confidence to entreaty. “Won’t you try to love me as I love you, Leam? Won’t you try to love me as a wife loves her husband?”
She turned away. “I cannot,” she answered in a low voice, yet firm and distinct. It was a voice in which even the most sanguine must have recognized the accent of hopeless certainty, inevitable despair.
“Leam, it will be your salvation,” cried Alick, taking her hands. He meant her spiritual salvation, not her personal safety: it was a prayer, not a threat.
“You would not force me by anything you may know?” asked Leam in the same low, firm, distinct voice. “Not even for safety, Alick.”
“Which I would buy with my own,” he answered—“with my eternal salvation.”
“I am not worthy of such love,” said Leam trembling. “And oh, dear Alick, do not blame me, but I cannot return it,” she added piteously.
She saw him start and heard him moan when she said this, but for a moment he was silent. He seemed half stunned as if by a heavy blow, but one that he was doing his best to bear. “Tell me so again, Leam. Let me be convinced,” he then said with pathetic calmness, looking into her face. “You cannot love me?—never? never?”
“Never,” she said, her voice breaking.
Alick covered his face in his hands, and she saw the tears trickle slowly through his fingers. He made no com-plaint, no protestation, only covered up his face and prayed, weeping, recognizing his fate.
She was sorry and heart-struck. She felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him, trying to love him. Confused images of something dearer than this as the love of her life passed before her mind. They were images without recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love, and this was not like them. No, she could not yield. Sorry as she might be for him, and was, she could not promise to marry him.
“Yes,” he then said after a pause, lifting up his wan face, tear-stained and disordered, but making a sad attempt to smile—“yes, dear Leam, I was, as you say, dreaming. We shall always be friends, though—brother and sister, as we have been—to the end of our lives, shall we not?”
“Yes,” was her answer, tears in her own eyes and a kind of wonder at her hardness running through her repugnance.
“Thank you, darling, thank you! If you want a friend, and I can be that friend and can serve you, you will come to me, will you not? You may want me some day, and you know that I shall not fail you. Don’t you know that, my royal Leam?”
“I am sure of you,” she half whispered, shuddering. To be in his power and to have rejected him! It all seemed very terrible and confused to Leam, to whom things complex and entangled were abhorrent.
“And now forget all this. I was only dreaming, dear. Why, no, of course you could not have married me—never could—never, never! I know that well enough now. You see I have been ill,” nervously plucking at his hands, “and have had strange fancies, and I do not know myself or anything about me quite yet. But forget it all. It was only a sick fancy, and I thought what did not exist”
“I am sorry to have hurt you even in fancy,” said Leam; giving a sigh of relief. “I do not like to see you unhappy, Alick. You are so-good to me.”
“And to the end of my life I shall be what I have been,” he said earnestly. “You can trust me, Leam.”
“I am sorry I have hurt you,” she said again, bending forward and looking up into his face. “But it was only a dream, was it not?” pleadingly.
He smiled pitifully, “Yes, dear, only a dream,” he answered, turning away his head. After a while he took her hand and looked into her face, “And now it has passed,” he said, calm that she should not be sorry.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
Build for my love a costly sepulchre;
Not underneath cathedral arches
dim,
Where the sad soul may wake to comfort
her
The stately music of a funeral
hymn;
Nor on some wind-swept hill, whose wavering
grass
Sways to the summer breezes
blowing free,
While the great cedars, rustling as they
pass,
Murmur a cadence of the mournful
sea;
Not in the arched depths of the solemn
woods,
Within the flickering shadows
cool and deep,
Where the still wing of silence ever broods,
And woos the weary soul to
dreamless sleep.
But build it in the temple of my heart,
And from the sacred and mysterious
shrine
A flame of deathless memory shall start,
Tended by Sorrow and by Love
divine.
All sweetest recollections of past joy
Shall haunt that shrine, to
make it heavenly fair:
All memories of bliss without alloy
Shall cluster in undying beauty
there.
There quiet peace shall hold resistless
sway:
Softer than snow the holy
hush shall be.
Till even Sorrow gently glide away,
And Love divine alone keep
watch with me.
KATE HILLARD.
BY LADY BARKER.
ALGOA BAY, October 23, 1875.
Two days ago we steamed out of Table Bay on just such a gray, drizzling afternoon as that on which we entered it. But the weather cleared directly we got out to sea, and since then it has carried us along as though we had been on a pleasant summer cruise. All yesterday we were coasting along the low downs which edge the dangerous sea-board for miles upon miles. From the deck of the Edinburgh Castle the effect is monotonous enough, although just now everything is brightly green; and, with their long ribbon fringe of white breaker-foam glinting in the spring sunshine, the stretches of undulating hillocks looked their best. This part of the coast is well lighted, and it was always a matter of felicitation at night when, every eighty miles or so, the guiding rays of a lighthouse shone out in the soft gloom of the starlight night. One of these lonely towers stands more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and warns ships off the terrible Agulhas Bank.
We have dropped our anchor this fresh bright morning a mile or so from the shore on which Port Elizabeth stands. Algoa Bay is not much of a shelter, and it is always a chance whether a sudden south-easter may not come tearing down upon the shipping, necessitating a sudden tripping of anchors and running out to sea to avoid the fate which is staring us warningly in the face in the shape of the gaunt ribs or rusty cylinders of sundry cast-away vessels. To-day the weather is on its good behavior; the south-easter rests on its
aery
nest
As still as a brooding dove;
and sun and sea are doing their best to show off the queer little straggling town creeping up the low sandy hills that lie before us. I am assured that Port Elizabeth is a flourishing mercantile place. From the deck of our ship I can’t at all perceive that it is flourishing, or doing anything except basking in the pleasant sunshine. But when I go on shore an hour or two later I am shown a store which takes away my breath, and before whose miscellaneous contents the stoutest-hearted female shopper must needs baisser son pavilion. Everything in this vast emporium looked as neat and orderly as possible, and, though the building was twice as big as the largest co-operative store in London, there was no hurry or confusion. Thimbles and ploughs, eau-de-cologne and mangles, American stoves, cotton dresses of astounding patterns to suit the taste of Dutch ladies, harmoniums and flat-irons,—all stood peaceably side by side together. But these were all “unconsidered trifles” next the more serious business of the establishment, which was wool—wool in every shape and stage and bale. In this department, however, although for the sake of the dear old New Zealand days my heart warms at the sight of the huge packages, I was not supposed to take any interest; so we pass quickly out into the street again, get into a large open carriage driven by a black coachman, and make the best of our
As I saunter up and down the clean, smart-looking deck of what has been our pleasant floating home during these past four weeks, I suddenly perceive a short, squat pyramid on the shore, standing out oddly enough among the low-roofed houses. If it had only been red instead of gray, it might have passed for the model of the label on Bass’s beer—bottles; but, even as it is, I feel convinced that there is a story connected with it: and so it proves, for this ugly, most unsentimental-looking bit of masonry was built long ago by a former governor as a record of the virtues and perfections of his dead wife, whom, among other lavish epithets of praise, he declares to have been “the most perfect of women.” Anyhow, there it stands, on what was once a lonely strip of sand and sea, a memorial—if one can only believe the stone story, now nearly a hundred years old—of a great love and a great sorrow; and one can envy the one and pity the other just as much when looking at this queer, unsightly monument as when one stands on the pure marble threshold of the exquisite Taj Mahal at Agra, and reads that it too, in all its grace and beauty, was reared “in memory of an undying love.”
Although the day has been warm and balmy, the evening air strikes chill and raw, and our last evening on board the dear old ship has to be spent under shelter, for it is too cold to sit on deck. With the first hours of daylight next morning we have to be up and packing, for by ten o’clock we must be on board the Florence, a small, yacht-like coasting-steamer which can go much closer into the sand-blocked harbors scooped by the action of the rivers all along the coast. It is with a very heavy heart that I, for one, say good-bye to the Edinburgh Castle, where I have passed
With the same chivalrous goodness and courtesy which has taken thought for the comfort of our every movement since we left Dartmouth, our captain insists on seeing us safely on board the Florence (what a toy-boat she looks after our stately ship!) and satisfying himself that we can be comfortably settled once more in our doll’s house of a new cabin. Then there comes a reluctant “Good-bye” to him and all our kind care-takers of the Edinburgh Castle; and the last glimpse we catch of her—for the Florence darts out of the bay like a swallow in a hurry—is her dipping her ensign in courteous farewell to us.
In less than twenty-four hours we had reached another little port, some hundred and fifty miles or so up the coast, called East London. Here the harbor is again only an open roadstead, and hardly any vessel drawing more than three or four feet of water can get in at all near the shore, for between us and it is a bar of shifting sand, washed down, day by day, by the strong current of the river Buffalo. All the cargo has to be transferred to lighters, and a little tug steamer bustles backward and forward with messages of entreaty to those said lighters to come out and take away their loads. We had dropped our anchor by daylight, yet at ten o’clock scarcely a boat had made its appearance alongside, and every one was fuming and fretting at the delay and consequent waste of fine weather and daylight. That is to say, it was a fine bright day overhead, with sunshine and sparkle all round, but the heavy roll of the sea never ceased for a moment. From one side to the other, until her ports touched the water, backward and forward, with slow, monotonous heaving, our little vessel swayed with the swaying rollers until everybody on board felt sick and sorry. “This is comparatively a calm day,” I was told: “you can’t possible imagine from this what rolling really is.” But I can imagine quite easily, and do not at all desire a closer acquaintance with this restless Indian Ocean. Breakfast is a moment of penance: little G—— is absolutely fainting from agonies of sea-sickness, though he has borne all our South-Atlantic tossings with perfect equanimity; and it is with real joy that I hear the lifeboat is alongside, and that the kind-hearted captain of the Florence (how kind sailors are!) offers to take babies, nurse and me on shore, so as to escape a long day of this agonizing rolling. In happy unconsciousness of what landing at East London,
In about an hour “Capting Florence” (as G—— styles our new commander) calls for us and takes us out sight-seeing. First and foremost, across the river to the rapidly-growing railway lines, where a brand-new locomotive was hissing away with full steam up. Here we were met and welcomed by the energetic superintendent of this iron road, and, to my intense delight, after explaining to me what a long distance into the interior the line had to go and how fast it was getting on, considering the difficulties in the way of doing anything in South Africa, from washing a pocket-handkerchief up to laying down a railway, he proposed that we should get on the engine and go as far as the line was open for anything like safe traveling. Never were such delightful five minutes as those spent in whizzing along through the park-like country and cutting fast through the heavenly air. In vain did I smell that my serge skirts were getting dreadfully singed, in vain did I see most uncertain bits of rail before me: it was all too perfectly enchanting to care for danger or disgrace, and I could have found it in my heart to echo G——’s plaintive cry for “More!” when we came to the end and had to get off. But it consoled us a little to watch the stone-breaking machine crunching up small rocks as though they had been lumps of sugar, and after looking at that we set off for the unfinished station, and could take in, even in its present skeleton state, how commodious and handsome it will all be some day. You are all so accustomed to be whisked about the civilized world when and where you choose that it is difficult to make you understand the enormous boon the first line of railway is to a new country—not only for the convenience of travelers, but for the transport of goods, the setting free of hundreds of cattle and horses and drivers—all sorely needed for other purposes—and the fast-following effects of opening up the resources of the back districts. In these regions labor is the great difficulty, and one needs to hold both patience and temper fast with both one’s hands when watching either Kafir or Coolie at work. The white man cannot or will not do much with his hands out here, so the navvies are slim-looking blacks, who jabber and grunt and sigh a good deal more than they work.
It is a fortunate circumstance that the delicious air keeps us all in a chronic state of hunger, for it appears in South Africa that one is expected to eat every half hour or so. And, shamed am I to confess, we do eat—and eat with a good appetite too—a delicious luncheon at the superintendent’s, albeit it followed closely on the heels of our enormous breakfast at the dirty hotel. Such a pretty little bachelor’s box as it was!—so cool and quiet and neat!—built somewhat after the fashion of the Pompeian houses, with a small square garden full of orange trees in the centre, and the house running round this opening in four corridors. After lunch a couple of nice,
Before we left East London, however, there was one more great work to be glanced at, and accordingly we paid a hasty visit to the office of the superintendent of the new harbor-works, and saw plans and drawings of what will indeed be a magnificent achievement when carried out. Yard by yard, with patient under-sea sweeping, all that waste of sand brought down by the Buffalo is being cleared away; yard by yard, two massive arms of solidest masonry are stretching themselves out beyond those cruel breakers: the river is being forced into so narrow a channel that the rush of the water must needs carry the sand far out to sea in future, and scatter it in soundings where it cannot accumulate into such a barrier as that which now exists.
Lighthouses will guard this safe entrance into a tranquil anchorage, and so, at some not too far distant day, there is good hope that East London may be one of the most valuable harbors on this vast coast; and when her railway has reached even the point to which it is at present projected, nearly two hundred miles away, it will indeed be a thriving place. Even now, there is a greater air of movement and life and progress about the little seaport, what with the railway and the harbor-works, than at any other place I have yet seen; and each great undertaking is in the hands of men of first-rate ability and experience, who are as persevering as they are energetic. After looking well over these most interesting plans there was nothing left for us to do except to make a sudden raid on the hotel, pick up our shawls and bags, pay a most moderate bill of seven shillings and sixpence for breakfast for three people and luncheon for two, and the use of a room all day, piteously entreat the mistress
Having secured this precious quarter of a bottle of milk, for which I was really as grateful as though it had been the Koh-i-noor, we hastened back to the wharf and got on board the little tug again. “Now for the bridge!” cry G—— and I, for has not Captain Florence promised us a splendid but safe tossing across the bar? And faithfully he and the bar and the boat keep their word, for we are in no danger, it seems, and yet we appear to leap like a race-horse across the strip of sand, receiving a staggering buffet first on one paddle-wheel and then on the other from the angry guardian breakers, which seem sworn foes of boats and passengers. Again and again are we knocked aside by huge billows, as though the poor little tug were a walnut-shell; again and again do we recover ourselves, and blunder bravely on, sometimes with but one paddle in the water, sometimes burying our bowsprit in a big green wave too high to climb, and dashing right through it as fast as if we shut our eyes and went at everything. The spray flies high over our heads, G—— and I are drenched over and over again, but we shake the sparkling water off our coats, for all the world like Newfoundland dogs, and are all right again in a moment, “Is that the very last?” asks G—— reluctantly as we take our last breaker like a five-barred gate, flying, and find ourselves safe and sound, but quivering a good deal, in what seems comparatively smooth water. Is it smooth, though? Look at the Florence and all the other vessels. Still at it, see-saw, backward and forward, roll, roll, roll! How thankful we all are to have escaped a long day of sickening, monotonous motion! But there is the getting on board to be accomplished, for the brave little tug dare not come too near to her big sister steamboat or she would roll over on her. So we signal for a boat, and quickly the largest which the Florence possesses is launched and manned—no easy task in such a sea, but accomplished in the smartest and most seamanlike fashion. The sides of the tug are low, so it is not very difficult to scramble
“Pass up the baby!” is the first order which I hear given, and that astonishing baby is “passed up” accordingly. I use the word “astonishing” advisedly, for never was an infant so bundled about uncomplainingly. He is just as often upside down as not; he is generally handed from one quartermaster to the other by the gathers of his little blue flannel frock; seas break over his cradle on deck, but nothing disturbs him. He grins and sleeps and pulls at his bottle through everything, and grows fatter and browner and more impudent every day. On this occasion, when—after rivaling Leotard’s most daring feats on the trapeze in my scramble up the side of a vessel which was lurching away from me—I at last reached the deck, I found the ship’s carpenter nursing the baby, who had seized the poor man’s beard firmly with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other was attempting to pick out one of his merry blue eyes. “Avast there!” cried the long-suffering sailor, and gladly relinquished the mischievous bundle to me.
Up with the anchor, and off we go once more into the gathering darkness of what turns out to be a wet and windy night. Next day the weather had recovered its temper, and I was called upon deck directly after breakfast to see the “Gates of St. John,” a really fine pass on the coast where the river Umzimvubu rushes through great granite cliffs into the sea. If the exact truth is to be told, I must confess I am a little disappointed with this coast-scenery. I have heard so much of its beauty, and as yet, though I have seen it under exceptionally favorable conditions of calm weather, which has allowed us to stand in very close to shore, I have not seen anything really fine until these “Gates” came in view. It has all been monotonous, undulating downs, here and there dotted with trees, and in some places the ravines were filled with what we used to call in New Zealand bush—i.e., miscellaneous greenery. Here and there a bold cliff or tumbled pile of red rock makes a landmark for the passing ships, but otherwise the uniformity is great indeed. The ordinary weather along this coast is something frightful, and the great reputation of our little Florence is built on the method in which she rides
In the mean time, we are speeding gayly over the bright waters, never very calm along this shore. Presently we come to a spot clearly marked by some odd-colored, tumbled-down cliffs and the remains of a great iron butt, where, more than a hundred years ago, the Grosvenor, a splendid clipper ship, was wrecked. The men nearly all perished or were made away with, but a few women were got on shore and carried off as prizes to the kraals of the Kafir “inkosis” or chieftains. What sort of husbands these stalwart warriors made to their reluctant brides tradition does not say, but it is a fact that almost all the children were born mad, and their descendants are, many of them, lunatics or idiots up to the present time. As the afternoon draws on a chill mist creeps over the hills and provokingly blots out the coast, which gets more beautiful every league we go. I wanted to remain up and see the light on the bluff just outside Port d’Urban, but a heavy shower drove me down to my wee cabin before ten o’clock. Soon after midnight the rolling of the anchor-chains and the sudden change of motion from pitching and jumping to the old monotonous roll told us that we were once more outside a bar, with a heavy sea on, and that there we must remain until the tug came to fetch us. But, alas! the tug had to make short work of it next morning, on account of the unaccommodating state of the tide, and all our hopes of breakfasting on shore were dashed by a hasty announcement at 5 A.M. that the tug was alongside, the mails were rapidly being put on board of her, and that she could not wait for passengers or anything else, because ten minutes later there would not be water enough to float her over the bar.
“When shall we be able to get over the bar?” I asked dolefully.
“Not until the afternoon,” was the prompt and uncompromising reply, delivered through my keyhole by the authority in charge of us. And he proved to be quite right; but I am bound to say the time passed more quickly than we had dared to hope or expect, for an hour later a bold little fishing-boat made her way through the breakers and across the bar in the teeth of wind and rain, bringing F—— on board. He has been out here these eight months, and looks a walking advertisement of the climate and temperature of our new home, so absolutely healthy is his appearance. He is very cheery about liking the place, and particularly insists on the blooming faces and sturdy limbs I shall see belonging to the young Natalians. Altogether, he appears thoroughly happy and contented, liking his work, his position, everything and everybody; which is all extremely satisfactory to hear. There is so much to tell and so much to behold that, as G—— declares, “it is afternoon directly,” and, the signal-flag being up, we trip our anchor once more and rush at the bar, two quartermasters and an officer at the wheel, the pilot and captain on the bridge, all hands on deck and on the alert, for always, under the most favorable circumstances, the next five minutes hold a peril in every second, “Stand by for spray!” sings out somebody, and we do stand by, luckily for ourselves, for “spray” means the top of two or three waves. The dear little Florence is as plucky as she is pretty, and appears to shut her eyes and lower her head and go at the bar. Scrape, scrape, scrape! “We’ve stuck! No, we haven’t! Helm hard down! Over!” and so we are. Among the breakers, it is true, buffeted hither and thither, knocked first to one side and then to the other; but we keep right on, and a few more turns of the screw take us into calm water under the green hills of the bluff. The breakers are behind us, we have twenty fathoms of water under our keel, the voyage is ended and over, the captain takes off his straw hat to mop his curly head, everybody’s face loses the expression of anxiety and rigidity it has worn these past ten minutes, and boats swarm like locusts round the ship. The baby is passed over the ship’s side for the last time, having been well kissed and petted and praised by every one as he was handed from one to the other, and we row swiftly away to the low sandy shore of the “Point.”
Only a few warehouses, or rather sheds of warehouses, are to be seen, and a rude sort of railway-station, which appears to afford indiscriminate shelter to boats as well as to engines. There are leisurely trains which saunter into the town of D’Urban, a mile and a half away, every half hour or so, but one of these “crawlers” had just started. The sun was very hot, and we voyagers were all sadly weary and headachy. But the best of the colonies is the prompt, self-sacrificing kindness of old-comers to new-comers. A gentleman had driven down in his own nice, comfortable pony-carriage, and without
Coolies swarm in every direction, picturesque fish- and fruit-sellers throng the verandah of the kitchen a little way off, and everything looks bright and green and fresh, having been well washed by the recent rains. There are still, however, several feet of dust in the streets, for they are made of dust; and my own private impression is, that all the water in the harbor would not suffice to lay the dust of D’Urban for more than half an hour. With the restlessness of people who have been cooped up on board ship for a month, we insist, the moment it is cool enough, on being taken out for a walk. Fortunately, the public gardens are close at hand, and we amuse ourselves very well in them for an hour or two, but we are all thoroughly tired and worn out, and glad to get to bed, even in gaunt, narrow rooms on hard pallets.
The two following days were spent in looking after and collecting our cumbrous array of boxes and baskets. Tin baths, wicker chairs and baskets, all had to be counted and recounted, until one got weary of the word “luggage;” but that is the penalty of drafting babies about the world. In the intervals of the serious business of tracing No. 5 or running No. 10 to earth in the corner of a warehouse, I made many pleasant acquaintances and received kindest words and notes of welcome from unknown friends. All this warm-hearted, unconventional kindness goes far to make the stranger forget his “own people and his father’s house,” and feel at once at home amid strange and unfamiliar scenes. After all, “home” is portable, luckily, and a welcoming smile and hand-clasp act as a spell to create it in any place. We also managed, after business-hours, when it was of no use making expeditions to wharf or custom-house after recusant carpet-bags, to drive to the Botanic Gardens. They are extensive and well kept, but seem principally devoted to shrubs. I was assured that this is the worst time of year for flowers, as the plants have not yet recovered from the winter drought. A dry winter and wet summer is the correct atmospheric fashion here: in winter everything is brown and dusty and dried
There was still much to be done by the afternoon—many visitors to receive, notes to write and packages to arrange, for our traveling of these fifty-two miles spreads itself over a good many hours, as you will see. About three o’clock the government mule-wagon came to the door. It may truly and literally be described as “stopping the way,” for not only is the wagon itself a huge and cumbrous machine, but it is drawn by eight mules in pairs, and driven by a couple of black drivers. I say “driven by a couple of drivers,” because the driving was evidently an affair of copartnership: one held the reins—such elaborate reins as they were! a confused tangle of leather—and the other had the care of two or three whips of differing lengths. The drivers were both jet black—not Kafirs, but Cape blacks—descendants of the old slaves taken by the Dutch. They appeared to be great friends, these two, and took earnest counsel together at every rut and drain and steep pinch of the road, which stretched away, over hill and dale, before us, a broad red track, with high green hedges on either hand. Although the rain had not yet fallen long or heavily, the ditches were all running
A steady downpour of rain all through the night made our early start next day an affair of doubt and discouragement and dismal prophecy; but we persevered, and accomplished another long stage through a cold persistent drizzle before reaching an inn, where we enjoyed simply the best breakfast I ever tasted, or at all events the best I have tasted in Natal. The mules were also unharnessed, and after taking, each, a good roll on the damp grass, turned out in the drizzling rain for a rest and a nibble until their more substantial repast was ready. The rain cleared up from time to time, but an occasional heavy shower warned us that the weather was still sulky. It was in much better heart and spirits, however, that we made a second start about eleven o’clock, and struggled on through heavy roads up and down weary hills, slipping here, sliding there, and threatening to stick everywhere. Our next stage was to a place where the only available shelter was a filthy inn, at which we lingered as short a time as practicable—only long enough, in fact, to feed the mules—and then, with every prospect of a finer afternoon, set out once more on the last and longest stage of our journey. All the way the road has been very beautiful, in spite of the shrouding mist, especially at the Inchanga Pass, where round the shoulder of the hill as fair a prospect of curved green hills, dotted with clusters of timber exactly like an English park, of distant ranges rising in softly-rounded outlines, with deep violet shadows in the clefts and pale green lights on the slopes, stretches before you as the heart of painter could
But to return to the last hours of our journey. The mules struggle bravely along, though their ears are beginning to flap about any way, instead of being held straight and sharply pricked forward, and the encouraging cries of “Pull up, Capting! now then, Blue-bok, hi!” become more and more frequent: the driver in charge of the whips is less nice in his choice of a scourge with which to urge on the patient animals, and whacks them soundly with whichever comes first. The children have long ago wearied of the confinement and darkness of the back seats of the hooded vehicle; we are all black and blue from jolting in and out of deep holes hidden by mud which occur at every yard; but still our flagging spirits keep pretty good, for our little Table Mountain has been left behind, whilst before us, leaning up in one corner of an amphitheatre of hills, are the trees which mark where Maritzburg nestles. The mules see it too, and, sniffing their stables afar off, jog along faster. Only one more rise to pull up: we turn a little off the high-road, and there, amid a young plantation of trees, with roses, honeysuckle and passion-flowers climbing up the posts of the wide verandah, a fair and enchanting prospect lying at our feet, stands our new home, with its broad red tiled roof stretching out a friendly welcome to the tired, belated travelers.
I.
From tales of rural gods I rose,
And sought them through the
woody deeps,
Where, held in shadowy, sweet repose,
The sunshine, like Endymion,
sleeps—
Where murmurous waters softly sing
To listening branches, bended
low,
And tuneful birds on waving wing,
As Zephyrus, gently come and
go.
II.
Vainly I sought the gods, yet heard
Their whispering spirits say
to mine,
“Who seeks us finds the forests
stirred
By myriad voices all divine,
And learns that still the mystic spell
Of fauns and dryads fills
the place
With beauty myths have failed to tell—
One god in every hidden face.”
MARY B. DODGE.
It was in Vienna during the stormy days of October, 1848. The sky was lurid with the glow of surrounding conflagrations: roof and turret were illumined by the glaring reflection of the sea of fire, while the broad Danube madly stretched forth its blood-red tongue to the blood-red walls of the city. The clashing of weapons and rolling of drums resounded through the streets. Every house became in its turn a fortress, every window a porthole. During these days of horror there assembled in the evening at the dwelling of Friedrich Bodenstedt a circle of friends, who sought in conversation on literary topics some relief after the agitating experiences of the day.
“Bodenstedt,” exclaimed Auerbach on one of these occasions, “tell us of your adventures in the East. Awake with blithesome touch the memories of your past: transport us into a new world where will be dispelled the gloom of the present.”
“Yes, do,” chimed in the rest, drawing their chairs closer together.
“Tell us, above all, of your famous teacher, Mirza-Schaffy,” added Kaufmann.
One usually narrates one’s experiences best in a circle of sympathetic listeners, and even under ordinary circumstances Bodenstedt was esteemed a good talker. Soon a spirit of cheerfulness prevailed, and as the friends sat far into the night, the tumult without, the burning suburbs, the beat of drums and the firing of cannons were forgotten.
Night after night the friends met—poets, philosophers, men of learning, artists—and sat, to use Bodenstedt’s own words, “on the carpet of expectation, smoked the pipe of satisfaction, saw the sunshine of wine sparkle up from the flask, and fished for words of pearls with the delicate nets of the ears.” The story of Eastern life grew and rounded in its proportions, and Auerbach, who seemed most of all entranced, insisted that the source of so fascinating a narrative should be guided through the “canal of the pen into the sea of publicity.” Bodenstedt demurred, maintaining that the “art-hewn path from the head to the hand” was far more difficult to traverse than the natural one from the mouth to the ear.
“Yes, but it leads farther,” rejoined Auerbach, “and what pleases us, who listen, you may rest assured, with critical ears, cannot fail to please in more extended circles.”
Upon this foundation arose that delightful book, A Thousand and One Days in the Orient, which was the occasion of one of the most amusing mystifications and controversies that ever occupied the German literary world.
Friedrich Bodenstedt was born at Peine in Hanover, April 21, 1819. Notwithstanding his precocious intellectuality and remarkable poetic talents, he was condemned by his parents to a mercantile career. After a mournful apprenticeship he managed, however, to escape from this uncongenial employment, and pursued a course of study at Goettingen, Munich and Berlin, devoting himself chiefly to philology and history. The year 1840 found him in Moscow as private tutor in the family of Prince Galitzin, and shortly after he published his first volume of poetry. Later, he was appointed teacher of languages at the Tiflis Gymnasium, and the result of his learned investigations here were given to the world in his People of Caucasus, in which, however, were wholly thrust into the background poetical reminiscences evoked, as we have seen, by gifted and genial friends.
During his sojourn in Tiflis, the mountain-encompassed capital of Georgia, Bodenstedt undertook the study of the Tartar language, finding it to be a universally-employed means of communication with the many-tongued races of Caucasus. Among the numerous teachers recommended to him, he selected one called Mirza-Schaffy, “the wise man of Gjaendsha,” being attracted to him partly because of his calm, dignified demeanor, partly because he possessed a sufficient knowledge of Russian, with which Bodenstedt was perfectly familiar, to render intercourse easy and agreeable.
Here it may not be amiss to observe that “Mirza” is a title which placed before a proper name signifies “scribe”—after a name it designates a prince. Thus, Mirza-Schaff[^y] means “Scribe Schaffy,” but Schaffy-Mirza would mean “Prince Schaffy.” Each word, when pronounced separately, has the accent on the last syllable, but together they are pronounced as one word, with the accent on the final syllable.
The Tartars possess no such brilliant stores of literature as the Persians, but they are endowed with a manly vigor which the latter have lost. Mirza-Schaffy was a Tartar by birth, nurtured with Persian culture, and was, when Bodenstedt made his acquaintance, in December, 1843, a man of some forty years of age, of very stately appearance and excessive neatness. He wore a soft silken suit, about which he carelessly draped a blue Turkish cloak, while a tall black sheep-skin hat of sugar-loaf form adorned his shapely head. A dark, well-tended beard framed his handsomely chiseled face, whose calm, earnest expression was heightened by the deep, rich hue of his complexion, and his large, serious eyes were void of the usual cunning of his class. His high-heeled slippers, whose purity he miraculously preserved unimpaired when mud was at its height in the streets of Tiflis, he left always at the threshold of his pupil’s room, pressing carpet and divan only with his immaculate variegated stockings.
But Mirza-Schaffy’s main charm lay in his thorough genuineness, his earnestness of purpose and the tranquillity of his whole being. Misfortune and sorrow had visited him in many forms, leaving their impress on his brow, yet he had not been crushed; and thoroughly as he appreciated the refined enjoyments of life, he could most gracefully renounce luxuries attainable only by Fortune’s favorites. So long as he could have his tschibuq filled with good tobacco and his goblet with good wine, both of which were plentiful in Tiflis, he seemed content with the entire dispensation of the world. Highly as he prized, however, the beneficent effects of wine, he was an enemy to excess, having made moderation in all things the law of his life.
The whole atmosphere surrounding the man produced a deep and lasting impression on Bodenstedt, who, longing to immortalize the name of one who had unfolded to him the treasures of Eastern lore, and from whom he had derived so much pleasure and profit, conceived the idea of representing his teacher in his public characterization with poetic freedom, as a type of the Eastern poet and man of learning. Poet, Mirza-Schaffy was not in reality, for although he was skilled in the art of rhyming, and could translate with ease any simple song from the Persian into the Tartar language, Bodenstedt found only one of his original efforts which was worthy of preservation. The song referred to was one hurled, as it were, at the head of an offending mullah who had derided Mirza-Schaffy for his tenderness to wine, and reads as follows:
Mullah! pure is our wine:
It to revile were sin.
Shouldst thou censure my word,
May’st find truth therein!
No devotion hath me
To thy mosque led to pray:
Through wine render’d free,
I have chanced there to stray.
All other poems introduced into the Thousand and One Days in the Orient are entirely of Bodenstedt’s own composition, were designed to add flavor to the picture of an Eastern divan of wisdom, and were usually written while the impression was fresh of intercourse with the wise man of Gjaendsha. Shortly after the appearance of the book, which was well received by the public, the publisher proposed to Bodenstedt to issue separately the poems contained in it; and this was finally done in an attractive volume entitled The Songs of Mirza-Schaffy, many additions being made to the original collection. Of these, one of the most fresh and sparkling is a spring song, which has never before appeared in English, and which we present as a fitting introduction:
When young Spring up mountain-peaks doth
hie,
And the sunbeams scatter stores
of snow—
When the trees put forth their leaflets
shy,
And amid grass the first wild
flower doth blow—
When in yonder
vale
Fleeth in a gale
All the dolesome rain and
wintry wail,
Rings from upland
air
Forth
to many a clime,
“Oh, how
wond’rous fair
Is
the glad spring-time!”
When the glaciers quail ’neath hot
sunbeams,
And all Nature into life doth
spring—
When from mountain-sides gush forth cool
streams,
And with sounds of glee the
forests ring—
Fragrant zephyrs
too
Stray the green
meads through
And the heavens smile, serene
and blue.
While from upland
air
Rings
to many a clime,
“Oh, how
wond’rous fair
Is
the glad spring-time!”
And was it not in the days of spring
That thy heart and mine, O
maiden fair!
Were united, while our lips did cling
In their first long kiss,
so sweet and rare?
What the glad
grove sang
Through the wide
vale rang,
And the fresh stream from
the mountain sprang.
While the upland
air
Wafted
forth its rhyme,
“Oh, how
wond’rous fair
Is
the glad spring-time!”
Seldom has a volume of poems been received with more general applause. Their renown spread rapidly through their native land; constantly increasing demand for copies rendered needful frequent new editions, to which at divers times were added by the author freshly-created poems; and the interest is still alive, now nearly quarter of a century after their first appearance, when they have passed their fiftieth edition. They have been at one time or other translated into most of the modern tongues of Europe; and that they have never gained popularity with us is due probably to the fact that in those which have been translated into our tongue neither the essence nor the form of the original has been preserved. By the title no mystification was ever designed: it came, as it were, of itself, and the purport of the narrative through which the main songs were interwoven being well known, it was never, supposed that a doubt concerning the authorship could arise. Nevertheless, the critics accepted them as translations from the Persian, and sharp lines of distinction were drawn between the poet, Mirza-Schaffy, and his translator, Friedrich Bodenstedt, not precisely to the advantage of the latter. Many a hearty laugh did Bodenstedt indulge in on reading in one or another learned dissertation that he was the possessor of a very neat poetic talent, and frequently reminded one in his original compositions of the works of his genial teacher, Mirza-Schaffy, of which he had given admirable translations, though without attaining to the excellence of the original. Now, a poet, in the wildest flights of his imagination, could not hope for a more brilliant success for the poetic fiction of his own creation than to have it accepted by the world as a living reality. In this he would naturally delight, even though his own personality were for a time thrust into the background, precisely like a loving father whose children meet with better fortune in life than himself. Sundry renditions into foreign tongues were even announced as direct translations from the Persian.
After the death of the real Mirza-Schaffy in 1852, which was duly announced by the press, sundry efforts were made by Eastern travelers to visit his grave in Tiflis and gain those particulars concerning him and his writings which Bodenstedt was supposed to have selfishly withheld from the public. Of these, one of the most prominent was Professor H. Brugsch, secretary of the Prussian embassy to Persia in 1860, who in his book of travels thus descants on his futile efforts: “No one could inform us where the last earthly remains of a certain Mirza-Schaffy were laid to rest. We consoled ourselves with the reflection that neither mounds nor monuments are requisite to preserve a poet’s fame, but that through his songs is his name transmitted to posterity. Yet even here we were doomed to disappointment. No one whom we encountered knew aught of the songs of the jovial, genial Mirza-Schaffy which in our German Fatherland have penetrated to the very life of the people.”
Some years later the Russian imperial state counselor Berge, while chief of educational institutions in Caucasus, also made the matter a subject of investigation, and in the year 1870 gave the history thereof to the world in the Journal of the German Oriental Society. He tells of his vain efforts to learn something of the genius of Mirza-Schaffy in his own land, and the amusement he created by his queries concerning possible posthumous works, and finally settles the question beyond dispute concerning the authorship of the poems.
After this, Bodenstedt yielded to the solicitations of friends to give in the pages of the popular German magazine Daheim a correct version of the whole affair.
Let the reader present to his mind’s eye a picture of the Eastern scribe, clad in the apparel before described, seated on the comfortable divan, with legs crossed after the fashion of the country, the long tschibuq caressingly held in one hand, the other uplifted, and with finger pointed to his brow, haranguing the German man of letters at his side on the advantages to be enjoyed under his tuition, and on the idle pretensions of those who call themselves learned without so much as comprehending the sacred languages. He cherished, however, the pious hope that in the course of time, thanks to his efforts, the enlightenment of the East might take effect in the West, which hope was strengthened by the encouraging fact that Bodenstedt was the fifth scholar who had felt the need of migrating to Tiflis to profit by his instructions. In his excess of national modesty the wise man of Gjaendsha only styled himself the first wise man of the East, but since the children of the West dwelt under a dark cloud of unbelief, it resulted as a matter of course that he must be the wisest of all men.
“I, Mirza-Schaffy,” said he to his pupil, “am the first wise man of the East, consequently thou, as my disciple, art the second. But misunderstand me not. I have a friend, Omar Effendi, an extremely wise man, who verily is not third among the learned scribes of the land. Did not I live, and were Omar Effendi thy teacher, he would be first, and thou the second wise man.”
On being asked what he should do if told that the wise men of the West would consider him as deficient in enlightenment as he did them, he rejoined, “What could I do but be amazed at their folly? What new thing can I learn from their opinions when they merely repeat my own?” Hence the song:
Shall I laugh or fall to wailing
That the most of men so dumb
are,
Ever borrowed thoughts retailing,
And in mother-wit so mum are?
No: thanksgiving heavenward rise
That fools so crowd this generation,
Else the wisdom of the wise
Would be lost to observation.
Numerous rivals envied Mirza-Schaffy his lessons, for each of which he was paid a whole silver ruble—an unusually high tuition-fee. Most formidable among these was Mirza-Jussuf (Joseph), the wise man of Bagdad, who called one day on Bodenstedt and boldly informed him that the revered Mirza-Schaffy was an Ischekj ("an ass”) among the bearers of wisdom—that he could not write properly, and could not sing at all. “And what is wisdom without song?” he exclaimed. “What is Mirza-Schaffy compared with me?” With bewildering eloquence he set forth his own superior accomplishments, dwelling largely on his name, which had been exalted by the Hebrew poet Moses as well as by the Persian poet Hafiz, and exerting himself to prove that the significance of a great name must be transmitted to all future bearers thereof. He was still speaking when a measured tread was heard in the ante-chamber, and Mirza-Schaffy himself drew near. He appeared to comprehend intuitively the cause of the guest’s presence, for he cast on Jussuf, who had become suddenly stricken with modesty, a glance of withering contempt, and was about giving vent to his emotions when Bodenstedt interposed with the words, “Mirza-Schaffy, wise man of Gjaendsha, what have my ears heard? You undertake to instruct me, and you can neither write nor sing! You are an Ischekj among the bearers of wisdom: thus sayeth Mirza-Jussuf, the wise man of Bagdad.”
Without deigning a word of reply, Mirza-Schaffy clapped his hands, a sign at which the servant usually brought him a fresh pipe, but this time he demanded his thick-soled slippers. With one of these he proceeded to so unmercifully belabor the wise man of Bagdad that the latter besought mercy with the most appealing words and gestures. But the chastiser was inexorable. “What?” said he. “I cannot sing, dost thou say? Wait, I will make music for thee! And I cannot write, either? Let it be, then, on thy head!” Whimpering and writhing beneath the blows accompanying these words, the wise man of Bagdad staggered toward the door and vanished from sight.
More calmly than might have been anticipated did Mirza-Schaffy return from the contest of wisdom, and promptly taking his usual seat on the divan, he began to exhort his German disciple to lend no ear to such false teachers as Jussuf and his fellows, whose name, he said, was legion, whose avarice was greater than their wisdom, and whose aim was to plunder, not teach, their pupils.
Later, Jussuf strove to win Bodenstedt by repeated messages, accompanied by songs in the most exquisite handwriting. Mirza-Schaffy’s opinion concerning these compositions is embodied in quite a number of songs, of which space must be found for one:
Forsooth! is Mirza-Jussuf a very well-read
man!
Now searcheth he Hafiz, now searcheth
the Koran,
Now Dshamy and Chakany, and now the Guelistan.
Here stealeth he a symbol, and there doth
steal a flower,
Here robbeth precious thoughts, and there
a true word’s power.
He giveth as his own what has been said
before,
Transplanted! the whole world into his
tedious lore;
And proudly decketh he his prey with borrowed
plumes,
Then flauntingly that this is poetry assumes.
How differently lives and sings Mirza-Schaffy!
A glowing star his heart to lighten paths
of gloom,
His mind a blooming garden, filled with
sweet perfume,
And in his rich creations no plagiarist
is he:
His songs are full of beauty, and perfect
as can be.
Mirza-Schaffy himself was a miracle of skill in chirography: none could equal him in wielding the kalem. His aim was not to impart a precise regularity to the characters, but to indicate by the writing the matter and style. Proverbs or utterances of wisdom were indited by him in a firm, bold hand with unadorned simplicity; love-songs with delicate, clear-cut lines, attractive capricious curves, enigmatical, almost illegible minuteness, designed to set forth the type of female character. The chirography of the songs to wine and earthly pleasure is full of fire and flourish—that of the songs of lamentation neat, legible and unadorned. To impart this skill to his pupil was one of his most earnest endeavors.
One day, when inspired by choice wine and soothed by the fragrant fumes of his tschibuq, Mirza-Schaffy was moved to tell of the love his heart had cherished—love such as man had never before known. The object of his adoration was Zuleikha, daughter of Ibrahim, the chan of Gjaendsha. Her eyes, darker than the night, shone with a brighter glow than the stars of heaven: passing description were the graceful loveliness of her form, the dainty perfection of hands and feet, her soft hair long as eternity, and the sweet mouth whose breath was more fragrant than the roses of Schiraz. He who was destined to be her slave had watched her daily for six months—as she sat on the housetop at midday with her companions, or on moonlight evenings when she amused herself with the dancing of her slaves—before he received so much as a sign that she deemed him worthy of her regard. He rejoiced in the splendor of her countenance, but dared no more approach her than the sun in whose warm rays he might bask. By day he was compelled to exercise the utmost caution, as his life would have been in jeopardy had Ibrahim Chan descried him casting loving looks at Zuleikha, but in the evening he was safe to draw attention to himself, as after eight o’clock the old man never crossed his threshold. Then the flames of the lover’s heart burst into song, and he gave utterance to a ghazel now of Hafiz, now of Firdusa, while still more frequently he sang his own songs.
Finally, Ibrahim Chan set forth on an expedition against the enemies of Moscow, and thus was afforded a rare opportunity for the enamored Mirza to present himself and his songs to the fair one’s notice. One dark evening, when the ladies had failed to appear on the housetop, as Mirza-Schaffy was turning disappointed away he was accosted by a closely-veiled female, who, bidding him follow her, led the way to a secluded spot where interruption would be improbable, and thus addressed him: “I am Fatima, the confidential attendant of Zuleikha. My mistress hath gazed on thee with the eye of satisfaction. The resonance of thy voice hath delighted her ear, the purport of thy songs touched her heart. I am come of my own accord, without my lady’s bidding, to let thee drink hope from the fountain of my words, because I wish thee well.”
“Has, then, Zuleikha not closed her ear to the poorest of her slaves?” exclaimed the overjoyed Mirza. “And will my heart not be lacerated by the thorn of her displeasure? Allah min! Allah bir! The God of thousands is one only God! Great is His goodness and wonderful are His ways! What have I done that He hath guided the stream of my songs to the sea of beauty?”
Fatima told him he did well to prize the merciful goodness of Allah and the loveliness of her mistress, who was a “jewel in the ring of beauty, a pearl in the shell of fortune.” Her noble lady, she said, would have given token of her favor before had not her virtuous modesty exceeded her beauty, and had she not feared the displeasure of her father, who tenderly loved her and would never consent to her stooping to a poor mirza. Then she proceeded to tell how Achmed Chan of Avaria, who was at the war with Ibrahim Chan, was suing for Zuleikha’s hand, which was promised by the father should he return triumphant from the campaign. This would render prompt action desirable, and Fatima suggested that Mirza-Schaffy should appear on the following evening, when the call to prayer resounded from the minaret, before the garden with his choicest offering of song, to which, the messenger was ready to wager, would be accorded a rosebud. Intoxicated with joy, Mirza-Schaffy bestowed on the friendly Fatima his purse, his watch and all the valuables about him, also promising a talisman to cure a black spot on her left cheek; and they parted with the understanding that they should meet, again for further communication.
And here, in exemplification of the learned scribe’s rejoinders to his pupil’s queries concerning the significance of the thorn of displeasure and the rosebud, is introduced the song:
The thorn is token of rejection,
Of disapproval and of scorn:
If she to union hath objection,
She giveth me as sign a thorn.
Yet if, instead, the maiden throws me
A tender rosebud as a token,
That fate propitious is it shows me,
And bids me wait with faith
unbroken.
But if a full-blown rose she tenders,
Its open chalice is a token
Which boldest hope in me engenders;
Through it her love is clearly
spoken.
On the ensuing evening Mirza-Schaffy presented himself promptly at the appointed place, prepared with a love-song which he knew none of womankind could resist. The evening was calm and clear, and on the housetop, alone with Fatima, was plainly discernible Zuleikha, her veil slightly drawn aside in token of favor. Taking courage, the enamored Mirza pushed back his cap in order to display his freshly shaven head, of whose whiteness he was excessively proud, and which he felt to be irresistible to maidens’ eyes, and began to sing his song, having first cast a written copy folded about a double almond-kernel, as a keepsake at the feet of beauty. The song given at this point is excessively flowery, and declares the maiden’s eyes to be brighter than those of the wild gazelle, her form more ethereal than the slender pine, and pronounces the wooer, his heart and his tuneful lay to be but slaves of her loveliness. This by way of preparation, the highest point of the offering being the concluding stanzas:
With faithful heart and hopefully
Approach I now Love’s
sacred bower,
And cast this wistful song at thee,
This fragrant song, as question-flower.
Accept with joy or scornfully,
Give my heart death or consolation,
Cast rosebud, rose, or thorn at me,
I humbly wait thy revelation.
Smilingly the maiden cast a rosebud at her waiting suitor, and for the first time fully displayed to him her beauteous face. From this moment new life dawned on our Mirza, and for six weeks he basked in the sunshine of felicity ere threatening clouds loomed up in his horizon. Then Ibrahim Chan returned from the war, and with him came his daughter’s suitor. A troop of horsemen had been despatched to Avaria for the bridal gift, and on their return they were to conduct Achmed Chan and his chosen lady home. Prize combats and festivities were planned to celebrate the return of the heroes, and at Zuleikha’s request a singing festival was likewise to take place. All the singers of the land were invited and bidden to prepare their choicest lays extolling the sovereign lady of the fete: to the victorious competitor would be accorded the right to break the instruments of his opponents.
Now was the time for Mirza-Schaffy to gather all his courage, for he knew the crisis of his destiny to be at hand. He arranged with Fatima that the day of the singing festival should be likewise that of his flight with Zuleikha, for he was troubled with no doubt concerning the success of his lyrical efforts. An Armenian who was about setting forth with a caravan was confided in, and engaged to reserve camels for and accord protection to the fugitives.
The minutes seemed like days, the hours like years, until the announcement was heralded that Ibrahim Chan had sallied forth with his guests to the prize combat, and that the ladies awaited the minstrels. They were assembled on the housetop, lovely matrons and maidens, and there was spread a large carpet on which set two players on the sass and tshengir, between whom each singer in turn took his place to sing his offering to the sound of strings. The handsomest boy in Gjaendsha was appointed to hand to each singer a silver plate, wherewith to conceal from the eye of beauty the emotions depicted in his countenance while singing. Twenty singers stood in a circle and stepped forth one after the other, Mirza-Schaffy, as the youngest of the number, coming last. All other emanations he felt to be faint sparks in comparison with the fire of his own. How could it be otherwise, considering the source of his inspiration? As he sang his heart swelled with ecstasy, and when he concluded there lay at his feet a full-blown rose. He was victor of the festival, yet so filled was he with thoughts of his beloved that he remembered not to break the instruments of the vanquished.
The flight was effected; the bride, although awaiting the coming of the bridegroom in bridal array, offering all due resistance as he led her from her home; indeed, so zealous was she to be faithful to the customs of her country that her cries would have roused the household had not the prudent Fatima interposed. On reaching the caravan a double security seemed to arise from the Armenian proving to be the accepted lover of Fatima; and Zuleikha, although deeming it a degradation for a daughter of Ali to unite her destinies with an unbeliever, was herself too strongly in the bondage of love to withhold her consent. Then how happy were they all! and what precautions were taken for their safety! Nevertheless, they were overtaken by the angry father and the outraged suitor of his choice. Zuleikha and Fatima were rudely snatched from the protection of their lovers, and the learned scribe—we blush to write it—received on the very soles which had borne him to the summit of bliss the ignominious blows of the bastinado.
From that day Mirza-Schaffy had felt indisposed to bestow his affections on mortal woman, and since the sun of his hopes had set dwelt serenely in the moonlight of remembrance. As Zuleikha, the embodiment of all virtue and beauty, had loved him, he believed himself to be an object of adoration to all feminine hearts, and grimly resolved that all womankind must suffer in expiation of his own sufferings.
During the winter there arrived another student from Germany, who, becoming acquainted with Bodenstedt, arranged to share with him the lessons in Tartar and Persian, which Mirza-Schaffy was pleased to call “hours of wisdom.” In course of time other friends joined the circle, so that finally arose a formal divan, where the wise man of Gjaendsha discoursed less on personalities, dwelling chiefly on general effusions of wisdom, interspersed with many a song. One of the latter reads as though designed by Bodenstedt to indicate the relation borne by Mirza-Schaffy to his own productions:
Thou art of my song the begetter;
Its drapery putteth my wand
on;
Thou yieldest the purest of marble,
And I lay the sculpturing
hand on.
Thou givest the spirit, the essence:
Me for utt’rance alone
mak’st demand on—
Oft my power’s deficient, and madly
Thy crude thoughts I haste
to expand on.
Sundry songs extolling the beneficence of wine and earthly pleasure arose at this period. Of these we find none more attractive than that which owed its origin to a conversation held in the divan of wisdom concerning certain Russians and Georgians who drank wine more freely than the camels drank water, yet had gained no inspiration therefrom:
From wine’s fiery fascination
From the goblet’s mystic
pleasure,
Poison foams, and sweet refreshment,
Beauty flows, and degradation,
As the drinker’s worth
may measure,
According to his brain’s assessment.
In debasement deeply sunken
Lies the fool, through wine’s
might captur’d:
When he drinks becomes he drunken;
When we drink we are
enraptured.
Sparkling gleams of wit, worth
dreaming,
Flash from tongues like angel’s
seeming,
And with ardor we are teeming,
And alone with beauty drunken.
Well resembles wine the shower
Which to mire fresh mire amasses,
But to fair fields brings a dower
Rich in blessing as it passes.
One evening Bodenstedt discovered his worthy teacher singing before a house on whose roof sat a graceful maiden, and from the man’s whole manner then and thereafter concluded that in the long-faithful heart had been at last replaced the image of Zuleikha. And so it proved. On the very evening when he was returning home with softened heart after the recital of the joys and sorrows of his first love, Mirza-Schaffy’s attention had been arrested by a lovely maiden who, as he pushed back his cap—solely, of course, to cool his heated brow—gave incontestable evidences of being smitten with him. When he went to his couch that night sleep refused to visit his eyelids, and as he restlessly tossed to and fro, the image of Zuleikha haunting him with reproachful mien, his thoughts turned ever to the peerless maiden who menaced further fidelity to the old love. Ere morning dawned he had resolved to break the spell, and for several days avoided the locality of the fair enticer. But the attraction became finally too strong to resist. He went, he saw the maiden, and she bestowed on him a glance which rendered him her slave for life;
A wond’rous glance hath met my eyes:
The magic of this moment rare
Worketh for aye a fresh surprise,
A miracle beyond compare.
A question, therefore, ask I thee—
Pay heed, sweet life whom
I adore—
Was that fond glance bestowed on me?
A token give, then, I implore.
And round thee could my strong arm cling,
Might I to thee life consecrate,
Loud jubilees my heart would sing,
And these to thee I’d
dedicate.
The first interview presents decidedly a comical side. By a confidential attendant Mirza-Schaffy was introduced on the roof disguised in female costume, his face and flowing beard modestly covered with a long veil. Luckily, he was not doomed long to such undignified concealment, for he soon managed, through his beauty and genius, to win favor in the eyes of the lady’s mother, and she promised to intercede in his behalf with the stern old father. The latter, however, having eyes neither for beauty nor poetry, thought only to demand what means of support the bold intruder had to offer his daughter, and when he learned how small these were, withheld his consent until the suitor could secure a professorship in some institution of learning. Although loath to renounce his freedom, Mirza-Schaffy determined for Hafisa’s sake to make application, as he had often been advised to do, at the Tiflis Gymnasium for the position of teacher of Tartaric. But, alas! there was prepared for our poor Mirza a humiliation second only to the bastinado. His reply was a portentous document in the Russian language, of which he could not read a word. Hafisa’s father demanded sight of it, had it interpreted by a learned mullah, and it proved to be a summons for the applicant to appear at an appointed hour for examination. This was too much. Mirza-Schaffy, the first wise man of the East, the pride of his race, the pearl in the shell of poetry, to be examined in his own language! Hafisa’s father declared his belief that the mirza’s wisdom was as doubtful as his fortune, and the wise man himself began to wonder whether his wisdom had not gone “pleasuring in the dusk of the evening.” Moreover, during the conference with the mullah certain revelations came to light concerning the lack of orthodoxy in the mirza’s belief and the frequent slurs it was his wont to cast on the powerful mullahs; and this set the old father hopelessly against him, causing him to revoke all promise of possible consent. Such being the case, Mirza-Schaffy had no heart to brave the humiliation of an examination. Shortly after, however, he was honored with a call to the new school at Gjaendsha, and Hafisa’s father dying about the same time, all obstacles were removed to a union with the maiden of his choice. And so with his bride he returned to his native place, and felt that the summit of earthly bliss was attained.
Friedrich Bodenstedt has been a very prolific author, having published several volumes of poetry, besides numerous romances, tales and miscellaneous works. He is one of a committee of poets and men of learning appointed not long since to retranslate the works of Shakespeare. At present he is adding to his well-earned laurels through his volume Aus dem Nachlasse Mirza-Schaffys. The book is divided into seven parts, the first of which is dedicated to love. Then there are songs of earthly pleasure, songs of consolation, sayings of wisdom, stories in rhyme of Eastern romance, a series of problems and a “bouquet of cypresses and roses.”
AUBER FORESTIER.
Look where a three-point star shall weave
his beam
Into the slumb’rous tissue of some
stream,
Till his bright self o’er his bright
copy seem
Fulfillment dropping on a come-true dream;
So in this night of art thy soul doth
show
Her excellent double in the steadfast
flow
Of wishing love that through men’s
hearts doth go:
At once thou shin’st above and shin’st
below.
E’en when thou strivest there within
Art’s sky
(Each star must round an arduous orbit
fly),
Full calm thine image in our love doth
lie,
A Motion glassed in a Tranquillity.
So triple-rayed, thou mov’st, yet
stay’st, serene—
Art’s artist, Love’s dear
woman, Fame’s good queen!
SIDNEY LANIER.
The heat of London in the midsummer of 1857, even to my American apprehension, was intense. The noise of the streets oppressed me, and perhaps the sight now and again of freshly-watered flowers which beautify so many of the window-ledges, and which seem to flourish and bloom whatever the weather, filled me the more with a desire for the quiet of green fields and the refreshing shade of trees. I had just returned from Switzerland, and the friends with whom I had been journeying in that land of all perfections had gone back to their home among the wealds and woods of Essex. I began to feel that sense of solitude which weighs heavily on a stranger in the throng of a great city; so that it was with keen pleasure I looked forward to a visit to Mr. Kingsley. A most kind invitation had come from him, offering me “a bed and all hospitality in their plain country fashion.”
At four in the afternoon of a hot July day I started for Winchfield, which is the station on the London and Southampton Railway nearest to Eversley—a journey of an hour and a half. I took a fly at Winchfield for Eversley, a distance of six miles. My way lay over wide silent moors: now and then a quiet farmstead came in view—moated granges they might have been—but these were few and far between, this part of Hampshire being owned in large tracts. It was a little after six when I drew near to the church and antique brick dwelling-house adjoining it which were the church and rectory of Eversley. There were no other houses near, so that it was evidently a wide and scattered parish. Old trees shaded the venerable irregularly-shaped parsonage, ivy and creeping plants covered the walls, and roses peeped out here and there. Mr. Kingsley himself met me at the open hall-door, and there was something in his clear and cheerful tone that gave a peculiar sense of welcome to his greeting. “Very glad to see you,” said he. Then taking my bag from the fly, “Let me show you your room at once, that you may make yourself comfortable.”
“Six weeks ago,” I said—“in London. He had just received news of the vacancy at Leeds, and at once determined to offer himself as the Liberal candidate. He went to Leeds for this purpose, but subsequently withdrew his name. I gather from his speech at the banquet his supporters gave him afterward that this was a mistake, and that if he had stood he would have been elected.”
“Ah,” said Kingsley, “I should like to see Forster in Parliament. He is not the man, however, to make head against the tracasseries of an election contest.”
Some other talk we had, and then he left me, coming back before long to conduct me to the drawing-room. Two gentlemen were there—one a visitor who soon took leave; the other, the tutor to Mr. Kingsley’s son. Mrs. Kingsley came in now and shook hands with me cordially, and I had very soon the sense of being at one with them all. Our having mutual friends did much toward this good understanding, but it was partly that we seemed at once to have so much to talk of on the events of the day, and on English matters in which I took keen interest.
India was naturally our first subject, and the great and absorbing question of the mutiny. I told what the London news was in regard to it, and how serious was the look of things. Kingsley said there must be great blame somewhere—that as to the British rule in India, no man could doubt that it had been a great blessing to the country, but the individual Englishman had come very far short of his duty in his dealings with the subject race: a reckoning was sure to come. Oakfield was mentioned—a story by William Arnold of which the scene was laid in India, and which contained evidence of this ill-treatment of the Hindoos by their white masters. Kingsley spoke highly of this book. I said I thought it had hardly been appreciated in England. Kingsley thought the reason was it was too didactic—there was too much moralizing. Only the few could appreciate this: the many did not care for it in a novel.
Our tea-dinner was announced: it was served in the hall. Mrs. Kingsley spoke laughingly of their being obliged to make this their dining-room. The talk at the table fell on American affairs. Sumner’s name was mentioned. I said he was in London, and that I had had a long conversation with him a few days before. Would I give them his address? they asked: they must have a visit from him. I said he would be glad to visit them, I was sure, for when I told him I was coming here he said he envied me. He was at present engaged in a round of dinners—expected to go to France in August to stay with De Tocqueville, but would be again in England in the autumn. Kingsley spoke of Brooks’s death—of the suddenness of it seeming almost a judgment. I said Brooks, as I happened to know, was thought a good fellow before the assault—that he really had good qualities, and was liked even by Northern men. “So we have heard from others,” said Kingsley, “and one can well believe it. The man who suffers for a bad system is often the best man—one with attractive qualities.” Charles I. and Louis XVI. were instances he gave to illustrate this. A recent article in the Edinburgh Review on slavery was spoken of. I said it had attracted a good deal of attention with us, because we saw immediately it could only have been written by an American. Of slavery Mr. Kingsley spoke in calm and moderate words. I told him his introductory chapter to Two Years Ago showed that he appreciated the difficulties with which the question was encumbered. He said it would be strange if he did not see these difficulties, considering that he was of West Indian descent (his grandfather had married a West Indian heiress). He admitted that the result of emancipation in the West Indies was not encouraging as it regarded the material condition of the islands, especially of Jamaica, and he was quite able to understand how powerfully this fact would weigh on our Southern planters, and how it tended to close their ears to all anti-slavery argument. They could hardly be expected to look beyond this test of sugar-production to the moral progress of the black race which freedom alone could ensure.
Our pleasant meal being over, we strolled out on the lawn and sat down under one of the fine old trees, where we continued our talk about slavery. Mr. Kingsley said he could quite believe any story he might hear of cruelty practiced upon slaves. He knew too well his own nature, and felt that under the influence of sudden anger he would be capable of deeds as violent as any of which we read. This, of course, was putting out of view the restraints which religion would impose; but it was safe for no man to have the absolute control of others.
He left us to go into the house, and Mrs. Kingsley then spoke of his parochial labors. She wished I could spend a Sunday with them—“I should so like you to see the congregation he has. The common farm-laborers come morning and afternoon: the reason is, he preaches so that they can understand him. I wish you could have been with us last Sunday, we had such an interesting person here—Max Mueller, the great linguist and Orientalist. But we can’t have pleasant meets here: we have only one spare room.”
“How old is Max Mueller?” I asked.
“Twenty-eight, and he scarcely looks to be twenty-two.”
“How long has Mr. Kingsley been here?” I asked.
“Fifteen years—two years as curate, and then the living becoming vacant, it was given to him.”
She told me a funeral was to take place directly—that of a poor woman who had been a great sufferer. “Ah, here it comes,” she said.
There was the bier borne on men’s shoulders and a little company of mourners, the peasantry of the neighborhood, the men wearing smock-frocks. They were awaiting the clergyman at the lichgate. Mr. Kingsley appeared at the moment in his surplice, and the procession entered the churchyard, he saying as he walked in front the solemn sentences with which the service begins. It was the scene which I had witnessed in another part of Hampshire some years before, when the author of The Christian Year was the officiating clergyman. Mrs. Kingsley and I joined the procession and entered the church. It was a small, oddly-arranged interior—brick pavements, high-backed pews, the clerk’s desk adjoining the reading-desk, but a little lower. Mr. Kingsley read the service in a measured tone, which enabled him to overcome the defect in his utterance noticeable in conversation. At the grave the rest of the office was said, and here the grief of the poor mourners overcame them. The family group consisted of the husband of the deceased, a grown-up daughter and a son, a boy of fifteen. All were much moved, but the boy the most. He cried bitterly—a long wail, as if he could not be comforted. Mr. Kingsley tried to console him, putting his arm over his shoulders. He said words of sympathy to the others also. They went their way over the heath to their desolate home. Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley spoke of the life of toil which had thus ended, and of the patience with which long-continued bodily pain had been borne. It was clear that the popular author was first of all a parish priest.
We now went into his study, where he lighted a long pipe, and we then returned to a part of the lawn which he called his quarter-deck, and where we walked up and down for near an hour. What an English summer evening it was!—dewy and still. Now and then a slight breeze stirred in the leaves and brought with it wafts of delicate odors from the flowers somewhere hidden in the deep shadows, though as yet it was not night and the sweet twilight lay about us like a charm. He asked if I knew Maurice. I did slightly—had breakfasted with him six weeks before, and had seen enough of him to understand the strong personal influence he exerted. “I owe all that I am to Maurice,” said Kingsley, “I aim only to teach to others what I get from him. Whatever facility of expression I have is God’s gift, but the views I endeavor to enforce are those which I learn from Maurice. I live to interpret him to the people of England.”
A talk about the influence of the Oxford writers came next: on this subject I knew we should not agree, though of course it was interesting to me to hear Mr. Kingsley’s opinion. He spoke with some asperity of one or two of the leaders, though his chief objection was to certain young men who had put themselves forward as champions of the movement. Of Mr. Keble he spoke very kindly. He said he had at one time been much under the influence of these writings. I mentioned Alexander Knox as being perhaps the forerunner of the Oxford men. “Ah,” he said, “I owe my knowledge of that good man to Mrs. Kingsley: you must talk with her about him.” We joined the party in the drawing-room, and there was some further conversation on this subject.
At about ten o’clock the bell was rung, the servants came in, prayers were said, and the ladies (Mrs. Kingsley and their daughter’s governess) bid us good-night. Then to Mr. Kingsley’s study, where the rest of the evening was spent—from half-past ten to half-past twelve—the pipe went on, and the talk—a continuous flow. Quakerism was a subject. George Fox, Kingsley said, was his admiration: he read his Journal constantly—thought him one of the most remarkable men that age produced. He liked his hostility to Calvinism. “How little that fellow Macaulay,” he said, “could understand Quakerism! A man needs to have been in Inferno himself to know what the Quakers meant in what they said and did.” He referred me to an article of his on Jacob Boehme and the mystic writers, in which he had given his views in regard to Fox.
We talked about his parish work: he found it, he said, a great help to him, adding emphatically that his other labor was secondary to this. He had trained himself not to be annoyed by his people calling on him when he was writing. If he was to be their priest, he must see them when it suited them to come; and he had become able if called off from his writing to go on again the moment he was alone. I asked him when he wrote. He said in the morning almost always: sometimes, when much pushed, he had written for an hour in the evening, but he always had to correct largely the next morning work thus done. Daily exercise, riding, hunting, together with parish work, were necessary to keep him in a condition for writing: he aimed to keep himself in rude health. I asked whether Alton Locke had been written in that room. “Yes,” he said—“from four to eight in the mornings; and a young man was staying with me at the time with whom every day I used to ride, or perhaps hunt, when my task of writing was done.”
A fine copy of St. Augustine attracted my attention on his shelves—five volumes folio bound in vellum. “Ah,” he said, “that is a treasure I must show you;” and taking down a volume he turned to the fly-leaf, where were the words “Charles Kingsley from Thomas Carlyle,” and above them “Thomas Carlyle from John Sterling.” One could understand that Carlyle had thus handed on the book, notwithstanding its sacred associations, knowing that to Kingsley it would have a threefold value. My eye caught also a relic of curious interest—a fragment from one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada. It lay on the mantelpiece: I could well understand Kingsley’s pleasure in possessing it.
At the breakfast-table the next morning we had much talk in regard to American writers. Kingsley admitted Emerson’s high merit, but thought him too fragmentary a writer and thinker to have enduring fame. He had meant that this should be implied as his opinion in the title he gave to Phaethon—“Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers”—a book he had written in direct opposition to what he understood to be the general teaching of Emerson. I remarked upon the great beauty of some of Emerson’s later writings and the marvelous clearness of insight which was shown in his English Traits. Kingsley acquiesced in this, but referred to some American poetry, so called, which Emerson had lately edited, and in his preface had out-Heroded Herod. Kingsley said the poems were the production of a coarse, sensual mind. His reference, of course, was to Walt Whitman, and I had no defence to make. Of Lowell, Mr. Kingsley spoke very highly: his Fable for Critics was worthy of Rabelais. Mr. Froude, who is Kingsley’s brother-in-law, had first made him acquainted with Lowell’s poetry. Hawthorne’s style he thought was exquisite: there was scarcely any modern writing equal to it. Of all his books he preferred the Blithedale Romance.
We talked of Mr. Froude, whom Kingsley spoke of as his dearest friend: he thought Froude sincerely regretted ever having written the Nemesis of Faith. Mr. Helps, author of Friends in Council, he spoke of as his near neighbor there in Hampshire, and his intimate friend. Mr. Charles Reade he knew, and I think he said he was also a neighbor: his Christie Johnston he thought showed high original power. Mrs. Gaskell we talked of, whose Life of Charlotte Bronte had just then been published: Mr. Kingsley thought it extremely interesting and “slightly slanderous.” He told me of the author of Tom Brown’s School-days, a copy of which, fresh from the publishers, was lying on his table. Mr. Hughes is now so well known to us I need only mention that Mr. Kingsley spoke of him as an old pupil of Arnold’s and a spiritual child of Maurice. He spoke most warmly of him, and offered me a letter of introduction to him. I could not avail myself of this, having so little time to remain in London.
I must mention, as showing further Mr. Kingsley’s state of mind toward Maurice, that he had named his son after him. He spoke of the boy as being intended for the army: the family, he said, had been soldiers for generations. “That is the profession England will need for the next five-and-twenty years.” Of Forster he said, “What a pity he had not been put in the army at the age of eighteen!—he would have been a general now. England has need of such men.” I note this as showing the curious apprehension of war which he, an Englishman, felt eighteen years ago, and which he expressed to me, an American. How little either of us thought of the struggle which men of English blood were to engage in in three years from that time! How little I could dream that one of the decisive battles of the world was so soon to be fought in my own State, Pennsylvania!
Our morning was spent in all this varied talk, walking partly on the lawn, partly in the study. His pipe was still his companion. He seemed to need to walk incessantly, such was his nervous activity of temperament. He asked me if it annoyed me for him to walk so much up and down his study. The slight impediment in his speech one forgot as one listened to the flow of his discourse. He talked a volume while I was with him, and what he said often rose to eloquence. There was humor too in it, of which I can give no example, for it was fine and delicate. But what most impressed me was his perfect simplicity of character. He talked of his wife with the strongest affection—wished I could remain longer with them, if only to know her better. Nothing could be more tender than his manner toward her. He went for her when we were in the study, and the last half hour of my stay she sat with us. She is one of five sisters who are all married to eminent men.
It occurs to me to note, as among my last recollections of our talk, that I spoke of Spurgeon, whom I had heard in London a short time before, and was very favorably impressed with. I could not but commend his simple, strong Saxon speech, the charm of his rich full voice, and above all the earnest aim which I thought was manifest in all he uttered. Mr. Kingsley said he was glad to hear this, for he had been told of occasional irreverences of Spurgeon’s, and of his giving way now and then to a disposition to make a joke of things. Not that he objected altogether to humor in sermons: he had his own temptations in this way. “One must either weep at the follies of men or laugh at them,” he added. I told him Mr. Maurice had spoken to me of Mr. Spurgeon as no doubt an important influence for good in the land, and he said this was on the whole his own opinion. He told me, however, of teaching of quite another character, addressed to people of cultivation mainly, and to him peculiarly acceptable. His reference was to Robertson’s Sermons: he showed me the volume—the first series—just then published. The mention of this book perhaps led to a reference by Mr. Kingsley to the Unitarians of New England, of whom he spoke very kindly, adding, in effect, that their error was but a natural rebound from Calvinism, that dreary perversion of God’s boundless love.
But I had now to say good-bye to these new friends, who had come to seem old friends, so full and cordial had been their hospitality, and so much had we found to talk of in the quickly-passing hours of my visit. Mr. Kingsley drove me three miles on my way to Winchfield. His talk with me was interspersed with cheery and friendly words to his horse, with whom he seemed to be on very intimate terms. “Come and see us again,” he said as we parted: “the second visit, you know, is always the best.”
ELLIS YARNALL.
A WOMAN’S OPINION OF PARIS AND THE PARISIANS.
I have now lived in Paris two consecutive years, and during this time the question has often been put to me, “How do you like Paris and the Parisians?” That question I will now try to answer.
Like Paris? Of course I do—heartily and truly. Cold indeed must the heart be that does not find space in its depths for a true affection for the fair queen-city which welcomes all strangers so kindly and hospitably, which has a smile for all, and which at the wide banquet of her bounty sets forth food for every phase of mental hunger. Do you wish to study? Her libraries lie open to your research—her monuments, her galleries, her public institutions are given to your inspection, freely and without price. Do you seek amusement? Paris, in that respect, is like the rollicking heroine of Barbe-Bleu: there is none like Boulotte, “quand il s’agit de batifoler.” Do you wish to hide yourself in depths of unbroken quiet? There are in her very heart lonely streets where scarce a cart ever penetrates, and in her suburbs green shaded nooks where the spirit of Solitude reigns supreme.
Life runs on such smooth and well-oiled wheels for all humanity in Paris that half the cares that torture us are cast aside as soon as we enter her precincts. Take, for instance, the grand question of housekeeping. Fancy living in a land where all the servants are skilled and civil, if not all trustworthy and honest; where washing-days and ironing-days and baking-days are unknown; where there are no staircases to sweep down and no front-door steps to scour; where rents and eating and all other household expenses may be gauged in accordance with one’s purse. If you wish to entertain, you may give a soiree that will cost ten dollars if you cannot afford to give a ball that costs five thousand. Nothing is de rigueur in Paris. It is neither incumbent upon you to be housed splendidly nor to feast sumptuously—to drive your own carriage nor to entertain an army of servants. “Do the best you can” is the motto of Parisian life. And so it often happens that in a small room, up half a dozen flights of stairs, with a cup of tea for sole refreshment and music or conversation for sole amusement, one will find some of the pleasantest society in Paris. You do not get champagne and boned turkey and the German, but you hear sometimes a little music, such as one pays untold gold to hear at the opera, or a fragment of declamation by some noted elocutionist, or a new poem fresh from the pen of some celebrated writer. And you have always conversation; that is to say, the wit and sparkle of the wittiest and brightest nation on the face of the earth. In a world that is becoming more and more a Paradise of Fools the charm of sheer brain and brightness is irresistible. To live in such an intellectual centre is in itself delightful. Paris is a veritable Foire aux Idees. Its criticism, keen as the sword of Saladin, overwhelming as the battle-axe of Coeur de Lion, is in itself a study. It is not so much the intellectual productions of Paris as the comments they call forth that are at once instructive and fascinating.
When we turn from the world of intellect to that of ordinary life the same charm haunts our footsteps. Everything is so well done, so gracefully and so winningly presented! The exquisite perfume of refinement hangs about every trivial detail. Your washerwoman is a lady, and your coalman a Chesterfield. If a Frenchman is ever rude, he is rude with malice prepense and aforethought. He knows better, we may be sure. Patrick may err on the score of politeness from ignorance, but Alphonse is a beast only because he chooses to be bestial. All the traditions of his race run counter to his conduct when he forgets the supreme suavity that should characterize a Gaul.
And yet it is possible for an American—or rather an Anglo-Saxon—to live for years in the midst of this brilliant, polished, fascinating people, and never to feel specially interested in them, either individually or nationally. What is the reason? Why is it that, loving Paris like a second home, we do not take the Parisians to our hearts as brothers and sisters, or at least as dear first cousins? The causes are many and various. In the first place, the Parisians do not like us. The popularity which Americans were said to possess in Paris has vanished with the Empire—that is, if it really existed. It probably was nothing more at any time than the courtesy shown by an astute sovereign of a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of purchasers. To-day Americans are not popular in Parisian society. It is almost impossible that they should be. Our ideas, our social customs, our notions of right and wrong, are diametrically opposed to all the social theories of France. Our girls, with their free frank ways and their liberty of speech and action, are so many disreputable horrors in Parisian eyes. Madame la Comtesse de St. Germain would as soon think of taking her daughters to see Schneider as of permitting them to associate with young ladies who are allowed to receive morning calls from gentlemen without the presence of their parents—who call the male friends of their childhood by their first names—and who are suffered to witness Faust at the opera and La Haine at La Gaite. Americans, especially wealthy ones, usually draw around them a vast circle of French acquaintances, it is true, but these are mostly sponges and adventurers, well born and well bred, it may be, but decidedly, to use a vulgar but expressive American idiom, “on the make.” Of the pure and inner sanctuary of French society scarce a glimpse is afforded to these alien eyes. It would not amuse them very much if it were, for, by all accounts, this hallowed inner circle is as dull as it is exclusive. The charm of French society is to be found in those salons which are frequented by the kings of Parisian Bohemia—journalists, poets, dramatists, artists—wherein the Republic is queen and Victor Hugo a god.
Two great and ineradicable defects underlie the brightness and fascination of the external part of French character—namely, selfishness and insincerity. Perfect in manner, in dress, in grace, in suavity, in sweetness it may be, the French are utterly and wholly unreliable. They resemble the phantom woman in the story told by Leigh Hunt, that was only a suit of clothes, with no face beneath the hood and no body inside of the robes; or rather those malignant spirits that look like fair women when seen in front, but when seen from behind show only as hollow shells.
And the tradespeople, the bourgeoisie—your dressmaker, your milliner, your tailor, your butcher and baker and candlestick-maker—skilled and suave and generally charming—O heaven and earth! how they do lie! Not occasionally, not when hard-pressed, not when truth will not do as well, but persistently, calmly, eternally. “I swear to you, monsieur,” will your Parisian say, “that your work shall be done in two hours,” Esteem yourself fortunate if it is finished in two days: very probably two weeks will see it still uncompleted. Send for a workman to execute some little job about your house. “He will come at once—yes, at once.” Days roll round, and he never comes at all. Your dressmaker agrees to make you a dress for a certain price: your bill comes home for half as much again. An American in Paris ordered an extra door-key, giving the original key as a pattern. The key was to cost four francs. Here is a copy of the bill as presented:
Francs.
For taking off lock (a process wholly unnecessary,
by the by),
1-1/2
For putting it on again,
1-1/2 Workman’s time,
1 Journey from shop (about half
a square), 1
Key,
4
____
Total
9
Another American sent for a bell-hanger to inspect an electric bell which was thought to be out of order, but which proved on inspection to be all right. He got a bill of five francs, whereof one item ran thus: “For looking at the bell, 2 francs.” He had not touched the thing, be it borne in mind.
I cannot refrain from here making answer to a remark too often heard from American lips, that America is as immoral as France—that American society is every whit as depraved as the French. It is not. The immorality of America is as a festering wound on an otherwise healthy body: the immorality of France is like a scrofulous taint that poisons the whole life-current. One gets weary and heartsick with the old eternal song, the everlasting theme, which is sung and told and dramatized and written about and painted—that flies in your face at every corner and stares up at you from every inch of printed paper, every square of colored canvas, in the whole nationality. And to sum up at last this, “a woman’s opinion,” I will freely state that the longer I live in France the more I admire the Parisians and the less I like them.
L.H.H.
The Collegio Romano was always worth a visit, because it contained the celebrated Kircherian Museum and the admirable observatory presided over by Father Secchi, the world-celebrated astronomer. But these are matters sufficiently treated of by the guide-books, and may be left to them. Of the story of the enormous building they have less to tell, though there is much of curious interest to be told. But neither is that my object on the present occasion. My purpose is to speak of the strangely-changed fortunes and destinies of the old historic pile, and of what it now is and is to be. But little in Rome, as we all know, has remained unchanged in these strange latter days. But few things—at least few material things—have experienced such a change as the Collegio Romano. The “Collegio Romano” was in fact nothing more than the principal convent of the Jesuits. The establishment was founded immediately after the institution of the order, and mainly by the care and energy of Saint Francisco Borgia, the third general of the order. The present building, however, was raised in the pontificate of Gregory XIII. by the Florentine architect Ammanati, the first stone having been laid in 1582. It is an enormous mass of building—enormous even among the huge structures for which Rome above all other cities is remarkable—situated near the church of the Gesu and not far from the Piazza di Venezia. There is nothing remarkable in its outward appearance save the vast size, the object of the builders having evidently been only to adapt it in a business-like way to the purposes to which it was destined. These included not only the provision of a residence for the fathers of the order resident in Rome, and for the all-but all-powerful general of the terrible order—the “Black Pope,” as the Romans were wont to call him—but also all the locale necessary for a very large educational establishment, whence the building took its name.
The Jesuits, like all other members of the almost innumerable monastic establishments in Rome, have, as we all know, been turned out of their homes, their property has been—or rather is being—sold, and the convents have become national property. Many of these are vast buildings, but no one of them is to be compared with the great Jesuit convent, which was the central home and head-quarters of the “Company of Jesus.” And a memorable day it was in Rome, and a very singular sight, when, the dreaded fathers of the terrible “Company” having taken their departure, the few remaining goods and chattels in the convent were sold by public auction. Few and not of much value were the articles to be sold; for the fathers are not men to take no heed of those shadows which coming events cast before them, and they had long foreseen that their day in Rome was at an end, and had contrived to leave as little as might be to the spoiler. None the less was it a strange sight, as I say, to see the profanum vulgus of the buyers of old furniture, and the still more numerous herd of the curious, looking on with very diversified feelings—some with bitterness enough in their hearts—pushing and tramping through those noble corridors and vast halls and secret cells, on which no profane gaze had rested for more than three hundred years.
There has been abundance of doubt, but no difficulty, in disposing of the great number of buildings which have thus come into the possession of the nation. Many of the smaller convents have been sold in the same manner as the other property of the ousted communities. But this has not been done—and indeed could hardly have been done—in the case of the larger buildings; and there has been a competition very much in the nature of a scramble for the appropriation of them by the heads of the several governmental departments. That of Public Instruction, now worthily represented by Signor Bonghi, has succeeded in laying hands on perhaps the grandest prize of all, the great Jesuit establishment of the Collegio Romano; and, looking to the uses to which it is being put by Signor Bonghi, it may, I think, be said that it could not have been better bestowed. Under his auspices it is intended to assume, and is indeed rapidly assuming, the functions of the still vaster pile of building in Great Russell street, London, known to all the world as the British Museum, as will be seen from the following statement of the purposes it is intended to serve and of the various matters to be housed in it.
On the ground-floor there is already established a “Museo Scolastico-Pedagogico”—a museum of all the means and appurtenances that are used, or have been used, in different countries for the ends and purposes of instruction. This is the idea and the creation of Signor Bonghi; and it will, I think, be admitted that it is a very happy one and likely to be fruitful in good results. A visit to it is more interesting than might perhaps at first sight be imagined. I may mention that on asking the very competent and enlightened director of the establishment what people he considered to have done most and as foremost in the work of educating the masses, he said that the Germans had done most theoretically and in the way of thinking on the philosophy of the matter, but that the Americans had done most practically in the way of improving the material means for popular education.
On the first and second floors the great national library, the “Biblioteca Vittorio Emmanuele,” is—or, it would perhaps be more accurate to say, will be—placed and made accessible to the public. At Florence there exists the celebrated Magliabecchian Library, which when Florence became the capital of Italy was called the National Library—somewhat ungratefully, it will probably be thought, to the learned and indefatigable collector who gave his life and his means to the formation of it, and then bequeathed it to his native city. And I am inclined to believe that this library is still, for all the general working purposes of a nineteenth-century student, the best in Italy. In Rome, when the Eternal City in its turn became the capital of a New Italy, there existed nothing that deserved to be called a national library, and the present minister of Public Instruction set about doing what was possible to supply the want.
I have not left myself room, I fear, to say anything on the present occasion of the other highly interesting collections which are at present lodged, or in the course of being placed, under the all-sheltering roof of the Collegio Romano. I must content myself with simply enumerating them, with the hope of giving some account of them at some future time. I may briefly state, then, that the celebrated Kircherian Museum, formed toward the close of the sixteenth century by the learned Jesuit father Kircher, still occupies the rooms on the ground-floor, with a somewhat improved arrangement, which it occupied when the fathers of the Company inhabited the building. The collection of ancient Roman marbles discovered in the excavations of the buried city of Ostia have been brought thence, and arranged in rooms also on the third floor—a fact which strikes one as not a little to the credit of the handiwork of Ammanati, the Florentine architect. Also on the third floor there is an exceedingly interesting collection, of which I hope to speak somewhat more at length another time. It is called a palaeo-ethnographical museum, and consists of a large collection of the implements of all sorts of the people belonging to the pre-historic period, together with a similar gathering of articles used by the uncivilized races of the present day. The interest of such a comparative study as is here suggested is, as may be readily understood, very great. On the fourth floor there is a very considerable collection of objects illustrating Italian art of the ante-Roman period, and also a Museum of Industrial Art, conceived on the plan of the English School of Art at South Kensington.
T.A.T.
In these days of trades unionism and strikes an account of the germ of such associations in this country is not without interest. So far back as 1806 a remarkable trial arising out of such a combination took place before the recorder of Philadelphia and a jury. It lasted three days and excited extraordinary interest. Jared Ingersoll and Joseph Hopkinson were counsel for the prosecution, and Caesar A. Rodney and Walter Franklin for the defence.
The defendants, eight in number, were indicted for not being content to work at the usual prices, but contriving to increase and augment them, and for endeavoring to prevent by threats, menaces and other unlawful means other artificers from working at the usual rate, and uniting into a club or combination to make and ordain unlawful and arbitrary rules to govern those engaged in their trade, and unjustly exact great sums of money by means thereof.
The evidence went to show in the clearest manner that a system of frightful thralldom had been put in force. A witness named Harrison stated that when he reached the United States in 1794 he found this system of terrorism prevalent. He went to work for a Mr. Bedford, and presently got a hint that if he did not join the association of journeymen shoemakers he was liable to be “scabbed,” which meant that men would not work in the same shop, nor board or lodge in the same house, nor would they work at all for the same employer. The case of this man seemed exceptionally hard. He made shoes exclusively, and when “a turn-out came to raise the wages on boots” he remonstrated, pleading that shoes did not enter into the question, and urging that he had a sick wife and a large family. But it was all to no purpose. He then resolved that he would turn a “scab” unknown to the association, and continue his work; but having a neighbor whom it was impossible for him to deceive, he went to him and said that he knew his circumstances, and that his family must perish or go to “the bettering-house” unless he continued to work. This neighbor, Swain, replied that he knew his condition was desperate, but that a man had better make any sacrifice than turn a “scab” at that time. He presently informed against him, and Mr. Bedford (his employer) was warned that he must discharge his “scabs.” He refused, saying that, “Let the consequence be what it might, we should sink or swim together.” However, one Saturday night, when all but Harrison and a man named Logan had left him, Bedford’s resolution gave way, and he exclaimed, “I don’t know what the devil I am to do: they will ruin me in the end. I wish you would go to the body and pay a fine, if not very large, in order to set the shop free once more.” The fine offered was refused, and Mr. Bedford’s shop remained “under scab” for a year. Still, Mr. Bedford, who must have been a very plucky fellow, would not give Harrison up, but removed in 1802 to Trenton. Harrison stated that although he could not, had Mr. Bedford given him up, have got work anywhere else, and that he might have ground him down to any terms, yet he (Bedford) very nobly always gave him full price. At length, by paying a fine, Harrison became reconciled to his persecutors, and Bedford’s shop was once more free.
William Forgrave said that “the name of a ‘scab’ is very dangerous: men of this description have been hurt when out at night.” He had been threatened, and joined the association from fear of personal injury. A vast deal more of evidence was given and eloquent speeches delivered by counsel, but the foregoing gives the sum and substance of the case.
In the course of the summing up Recorder Levy said: “To make an artificial regulation is not to regard the excellence of the work or quality of the material, but to fix a positive and arbitrary price, governed by no standard, but dependent on the will of the few who are interested.... What, then, is the operation of this kind of conduct upon the commerce of the city? It exposes it to inconveniences, if not to ruin: therefore it is against the public welfare. How does it operate upon the defendants? We see that those who are in indigent circumstances, and who have families to maintain, have declared here on oath that it was impossible for them to hold out. They were interdicted from all employment in future if they did not continue to persevere in the measures taken by the journeymen shoemakers. Does not such a regulation tend to involve necessitous men in the commission of crimes? If they are prevented working for six weeks, it might lead them to procure support for their wives and children by burglary, larceny or highway robbery.”
The jury found the defendants “guilty of a combination to raise their wages,” and the court sentenced them to pay a fine of eight dollars each, with costs of suit, and to stand committed till paid.
One of our popular clergymen, in a late Sunday discourse upon the Bible in the public schools, labored to show that the question was a very unimportant one. because none were much interested in it except infidels and politicians—a sufficiently absurd position for a professed teacher of the people to assume. Doubtless it is a folly to fan into flame the slumbering embers of a quarrel, but it is a greater folly to pretend, in the face of the common sense of the people, that all signs of fire are extinguished or never existed where there is so much inflammable material about and the “wind of doctrine” running high.
This question of secular education for our public schools is in fact one of the most difficult of solution. Chicago has met it in a summary manner by excluding the Bible from all her free schools, but this does not settle the question, because both believers and unbelievers in the various creeds of the churches admit that there should be provision made for the training of the moral faculties of the children in our public schools. Many of them, especially in cities and large manufacturing centres, come out of the dark alleys where intemperance, poverty and ignorance tend to arrest the development of their higher sentiments. For the unfortunate children of such homes the sessions of the public school afford the only glimpse of a better life, the only chance for moral and aesthetic culture. Protestants, as a rule, honestly believe that the reading of the Bible at the opening of school tends to waken and develop the moral aspirations of the child. Just as honestly and conscientiously
According to the American Annual Cyclopaedia for 1875, the Roman Catholic Church has in the United States 1 cardinal, 8 archbishops, 54 bishops, 4872 priests, 4731 churches, 1902 chapels, 68 colleges, 511 academies, and a lay membership numbering over 6,000,000. This shows a great and increasing prosperity of that Church in this country; yet our institutions have nothing to fear from that prosperity unless the principles of Catholicity support the “one-man power” against the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the foundation-principle of republicanism. Patriotic Catholic citizens claim that there is no conflict. They love their Church and their country, and will labor to preserve peace and harmony. Yet how can harmony be maintained while a large and increasing number of our tax-paying citizens, accepting their Church and its head as infallible, are forced by their spiritual allegiance to send their children to Catholic schools, though at the same time paying taxes to support those “godless” public schools condemned by the infallible Church? To take the ground that these two powers, the Catholic Church and our government, do not conflict, because one is a spiritual and the other a civil power, is simply absurd. We see that they do conflict. The pope interferes with the civil rights of our citizens when—as, for example, in his encyclical letter of December 8, 1874—he commands all Catholics to treat the liberty of speech, of the press, of conscience and of worship, the separation of Church and State and the secular education of youth, as “reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas.”
A recent lecture of the Rev. Dr. Storrs in New York, before the Society for the Advancement of Science and Art, must have been very interesting to an ordinary audience, but for one composed of professed promoters of learning it could hardly have been sufficiently exact to give general satisfaction if the newspaper reports of it were at all correct. They represent the lecturer as saying that an immense number of books date back to 1450. Now, the first printed book bearing a date is the Psalter of Fuest and Schoeffer, 1457. A portion of the Bible was printed by Gutenberg and Fuest in 1450, but the work was so expensive and so imperfect that it was abandoned. In 1452, after Schoeffer joined the firm, another Bible is supposed to have been printed, but no copy of it is known to exist. Of course it is well known that many of the earliest printed books are without date, but none could have been printed before 1450; and there is no proof, we believe, that the Bible said to be of 1455 bore that or any date. In that year the firm of Gutenberg, Fuest and Schoeffer dissolved. L. Gregoire in his Dictionnaire Encyclopedique, published in Paris in 1817, says that there are only three or four copies of the Fuest Bible known to exist. Dr. Storrs, however, says, without giving his authority, that there are fifteen.
The sole idea of the early printers was to imitate exactly the manuscript characters of the scribes. The initial letters of the Bibles and the numbers of the chapters were therefore added with a pen in blue and red ink alternately; and there is not the slightest doubt that these first books were palmed off upon an unsuspecting public as manuscripts. All the servants or employes of Fuest and Schoeffer were put under solemn oath to divulge nothing of the secret concerning printing. It is to the policy which the first printers exerted to conceal their art that we owe the tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus. Fuest having printed off quite a number of Bibles, and had the large initial letters added by hand, he took them to Paris and sold them for about fifty dollars apiece. The scribes demanded about ten times that sum, and they earned the money, for it must have been an herculean task to copy, as they did, every letter of the Bible with such exquisite care, and then draw and illuminate the heads of the chapters and the initial letters. It was a marvel how this new man could produce these ponderous books at so low a rate. And then the uniformity of the letters and the pages increased the wonder, until the cry of “sorcerer” was raised: complaints before the magistrates were made against him, his lodgings were searched and a great number of copies were found and confiscated. The populace in their ignorance and superstition declared that he was in league with the devil, and that the red ink with which the books were embellished was his blood. It is a satisfaction to know that the Parliament of Paris passed an act to discharge the sorcerer from all prosecution in consideration of the usefulness of his art.
M.H.
An Irish clergyman is said to have discovered last autumn a charming antidote to flies, which it is only a pity he could not have lighted on rather earlier in the season. Having occasion to change his abode, he sent on his window-plants, calceolarias and geraniums, to that which he intended to occupy several days before he went himself, and immediately found that he was pestered with flies, whereas previously he had enjoyed perfect immunity from the nuisance. A more agreeable remedy cannot be conceived. Next autumn let our windows be a blaze of brilliancy, so that all visitors to the Centennial may say, at all events, “There are no flies in Philadelphia.”
Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. Being an Essay towards the Restoration of Shakespeare’s Text. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A., LL.D. London: Truebner & Co.
Setting aside those who care merely to see a play on the stage, it may be said that of Shakespeare there are readers and readers; and both classes have rights and privileges which should be treated with deference. The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all. Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare’s through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds? When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop and philosophically investigate what Hamlet means by a “dram of eale"? Must we lose a scruple of the sport by turning aside to find out what Malvolio means by the “lady of the Strachey”? If Timon chooses to invite Ullorxa to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before? No: let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants. We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven’s gate. Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without let or hinderance.
But, fair and softly, is not this the very point at which we are striving? With all our twistings and turnings, our patchings and piecings, have we aught else in view than to decipher just what Shakespeare wrote? Where are Shakespeare’s exact words to be found? Not in the so-called Quartos; for they are said by Shakespeare’s intimate and dear friends to have been “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” and taken down perhaps from the lips of some of the actors, bribed by stoops of liquor at Yaughan’s (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to be feared that the potations were at times pottle
And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred and forty years has aimed at—merely to get at what Shakespeare really wrote. We know that he could not write sheer nonsense, and yet at times sheer nonsense mows at us from his printed page. Those who clamor for Shakespeare’s text, pure and simple, divested of all notes and annotations, have no idea how much thought and time have been expended on every line,—nay, on every word, on every comma,—in the text of any good modern edition of his dramas, and with the single aim, be it remembered, of revealing exactly what the poet wrote.
It must not, however, be thought that since the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays are so corrupt, any criticaster has good leave to expunge or expand at will, under a roving commission to hack and hew wheresoever and howsoever it may please him, under the plea of restoring the text. On the contrary, since we cannot fulfill the condition precedent of being Shakespeare’s peers, we must exercise the greatest caution in changing a reading of the Quartos or Folios, lest in condemning the text as corrupt we pass judgment on our own wit.
He who the sword of Heaven would bear
Must be as holy as severe.
And we must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda ’st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer’s interpretation of what he failed to comprehend.
But to understand Shakespeare’s meaning in a degree that will authorize us to amend the text, we must understand Shakespeare’s speech; that is, we must be thoroughly familiar with the words and usages of Elizabethan English; and not only with Elizabethan words and phrases, but also, as far as possible, with the very pronunciation.
This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby’s book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of The Still Lion, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton’s text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming. Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to “seek thy help by beneficial help.” At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of “Corruption!” “Sophistication!” “Cacophonous repetition!” etc. etc. “But gently, friends,” says Dr. Ingleby: “may not ‘help’ have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?” and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare’s own son-in-law), he proves that heal and help having a common origin, help was used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as a synonym for cure, deliverance. The text, then, is perfectly correct, AEgeon being bid to seek his deliverance from the doom of death by the help of what friends he can find. The lion’s slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless “felicitous” conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In As You Like It occur the familiar lines, “And
Great as is the service done in particular cases, the most valuable part of The Still Lion is the moral which it points, that “successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on the one hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other.” And in our opinion Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for it a spark of that creative power which is genius. But it must not be inferred that all the difficult passages in Shakespeare can be thus explained away. Despite all learning, or acuteness, or genius, there remains a considerable number that have never yet been solved, and never will be, in general acceptation, till the crack of doom. These, however, bear so small a proportion to the vast mass of perplexing riddles that have been satisfactorily settled that, like an infinitely small quantity in mathematics, they may be neglected. Therefore, let not him who wishes to read his Shakespeare unalloyed by notes and textual comment, despise the painful critic or accuse him of playing at loggats with the words of Shakespeare. It is through the labors of critics that the text is in such a shape that the work-a-day reader can read it at all. In the Folios and Quartos we see Shakespeare as through a glass darkly, but, thanks to those drudges, the commentators, in numberless places we can now see him face to face.
The Orphan of Pimlico, and other Sketches, Fragments and Drawings. By William Makepeace Thackeray. With some notes by Anne Isabella Thackeray. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
The artistic sense—the vivid conception of things and persons in their external aspects and with a constant regard to their groupings and the effect upon the spectator—made itself peculiarly prominent in all that Thackeray wrote. It is not that he gives us elaborate descriptions: this, indeed, is the resource of writers who are lacking in the faculty mentioned, and are consequently obliged to reach the result, if at all, by inferior means. His power lay in the selection of traits which were strictly characteristic, in making every act or phrase indicative of individuality. An astute critic, therefore—one gifted with that keenness of vision to which the exercise of the office unhappily implies a claim—should have been able to infer Thackeray’s dexterity with the pencil
BOOKS RECEIVED.
The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs for
1876. By J.J.
Thomas. Albany: Luther Tucker & Son.
The Chevalier Casse-Cou: The Red Camellia. By Fortune Du Boisgobey. Translated from the French by Thos. Picton. New York: Robert M. De Witt.
Household Elegancies. By Mrs. C.S. Jones
and Henry T. Williams. New
York: Henry T. Williams.
The Children’s Treasury of English Song.
By Francis Turner Palgrave.
New York: Macmillan & Co.
Stories from the Lips of the Teacher. By O.B.
Frothingham. New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Songs of Three Centuries. Edited by J.G.
Whittier. Boston: James R.
Osgood & Co.
Roddy’s Reality. By Helen Kendrick Johnson.
New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons.