Caper Sauce Part 12

Once again, but in the country, fragrant with blossoms, and sweet with the song of birds and the murmured whisper of leaves, just such a sombre procession crossed the green fields, under the blue sky, with its quiet burden. It is long years since I witnessed both; but they stand out in my memory, each as distinctly as if it were but yesterday. I don't know which was the more impressive. I only know that when I looked upon the latter, I said to myself, when life's fret is over, just so would _I_ be carried to my last rest.

One of the prettiest sights to be seen in the early morning is that of the little girls going to school. I like them best of a rainy day, because then their sweet little faces beam from out little close hoods, drawn about their red cheeks; and their little fat calves have such a tussle with the wind as they try to get round gusty corners; so that what with battling with their sandwich-boxes, and what with their geographies, their gleaming white teeth make a very lovely show between their rosy lips. What policeman, with the heart of a father, but would rather help a flock of these pretty birds across the street than a bevy of paniered ladies who shrink from their touch, all the while they are ready to scream with fright if they are _not_ taken by the arm.

Commend me to the little girls of six, eight, and twelve, who, not yet having come to their wickedness, squeal out with delicious frankness, "Mr. Policeman! Mr. Policeman! please come carry me over the street."

And so they swarm round him like a cloud of bees till they are all safely landed on the other side.

Bless their little innocent faces! It is as good as a chapter of the Bible to any policeman, to see such sweet white lilies blossoming amid the physical and moral filth which they meet in their rounds in the New York streets.

As it is rather an exception to find a little school-_boy_ who is not either a little saintly prig or a little well-dressed ruffian and bully, I have not contemplated their goings and comings with the same satisfaction as I do that of their little sisters; though _why_ a little _boy_ shouldn't be as well-mannered as a little girl I have always been at a loss to know.

One is occasionally an eye-witness to scenes in New York which momentarily paralyze one's faith in humanity, I had almost said in G.o.d.

One lovely afternoon of last week I determined to try the drive by the "new Hudson River road to Fort Lee," which, by the way, I rapturously commend, _en pa.s.sant_, to every New Yorker, and stranger within our gates who is fond of beautiful scenery. On the way we alighted, and entered one of the numerous rural gardens, to enjoy from thence a fine view of the river. Immediately our attention was arrested by loud voices; among which we distinguished that of a woman, now in loud, angry tones, then soft and pleading, as if deprecating personal violence. "Pay up, then," vociferated a coa.r.s.e, masculine voice, as a stout man appeared, grasping a young girl of eighteen or twenty by the wrist, dressed in a soiled tawdry bonnet and silk gown, and forcibly ejected her from the piazza of a refreshment room into the garden. She was a woman and young, and without understanding her offence, his brutality roused me; but my blood froze in my veins, when gathering up her form to its full height, raising her small hand in the air, and flashing her dark eyes, she cursed him as only a woman _can_ curse who is lost for this world and the next. And men stood by and heard it, who had mothers and sisters, and laughed, and jeered, and maddened her already excited blood, _for sport_, to fiercer words of unwomanly strife! A young man of her own age, who appeared to have accompanied her there, and seemed terrified at the turn of affairs, stepped to her side; but she sprang upon him like a panther, then bounded past him, then seized a garden stool, and hurling it at his head with blistering curses, ran through the garden to the river. For the first time I found voice to say--Great G.o.d--she will drown herself! and before the words were out of my mouth--a leap--a splash--and she had disappeared. A boat was near, into which two men jumped, and succeeded with her companion in catching hold of her dress, after she had twice sunk. Pale, gasping, in her tawdry, dripping finery, she was dragged on sh.o.r.e. One of the men turning to her companion said, "another twenty-five cents due for fishing her out."

Then two or three men--I suppose they _called_ themselves men--took her under the arm-pits with her face downward, and two went behind and seized her by the heels, her drapery falling back from her knees, while other men of the same stamp walked behind gazing at her exposed limbs.

Then they laid her upon a garden bench with her white face upturned to the fair sky, and stood over the gasping, sobbing creature, with less feeling than they would gaze upon a maimed horse or dog; her dress, torn from her neck, revealing to their beastly gaze youth and beauty which G.o.d never made for this desecration.

Oh! could I by a word have summoned the advocates of _Free Love_ to that spot--then and there would I have given them my dumb, eloquent answer to their nauseous, h.e.l.l-begotten doctrines. I would have summoned thither those women who have lately stood up in public as champions of their s.e.x's "rights" (Heaven defend us from their polluted, polluting tongues), and bade them look upon what they _must_ know to be the inevitable end of promiscuous "affinity." I would have summoned there those men of position in the community, who sit in their carpeted, well-stocked library, and in full view of their household G.o.ds--within sound of the innocent prattle of their own children--by their own _yet_ undesecrated hearthstones--write fine-spun theories upon Free-Love, claiming for its brazen female advocates the t.i.tle of "modest" women! I would have summoned thither the editors of those respectable daily journals, who publish in their columns the sophistical effusions of such men, and bade them, one and all, look upon that young, gasping girl, and the coa.r.s.e men who stood by and jeered at her.

As I turned soul-sick away, I saw a woman standing at a little distance with an infant in her arms, her face white with fear. As she gave a last glance at the girl she pressed her babe convulsively to her breast and covered its innocent face with kisses. The action was suggestive. Alas, just so must that lost young girl's mother _once_ have kissed _her!_

HOW EASY TO SAY "BE CHEERFUL"!--"Be cheerful," says the man who is easy in his circ.u.mstances, missing no loved face at the table, nor by the hearth. But does he ever consider how hard it may be to be "cheerful"

when the heart aches, and the cupboard is empty, and there are little fresh graves in the churchyard, and friends are few or indifferent, and even G.o.d, for the time being, seems to have forgotten us, so desolate is our lot? How difficult for one man to understand another, in such different circ.u.mstances! How easy to _say_, "Be cheerful!" How hard he would find it to practise it, were _he_ stripped of all life's brightness!

_DOG-DAYS IN THE MOUNTAINS._

To whomsoever human nature is a pleasant study, I would recommend as an inviting field a summer boarding-place. Wood, rocks, and lakes are nothing beside human nature. We can form some sort of an idea on geological, aquarian, and other principles, why _they_ exist. We quite indorse the Scriptural statement at creation that they are all "very good." But I am puzzled to know why a woman who can do nothing but simper and fold her hands should be married and have children without number, and another beneath whose large motherly heart no little one ever has or ever will nestle, should go mourning all her days on account of it. Why a man whose every impulse and feeling and purpose are unswervingly in the right direction should have an empty pocket; and a mean, narrow-minded, ignorant, miserable apology for a man, have his tight fist on a full one. Why consumptives and scrofulous people should insist on industriously increasing the census, and men and women made physically on the right principles pertinaciously cling to celibacy. Why the serving-maid should have more womanliness, intelligence, and goodness, than the mistress whose irate voice makes her tremble. Why the clergyman should pay such undeviating attention to the _soul_ of his child that he cannot spare time to see that his body at twelve years of age is "standing from under." Why a man marries a woman merely for her beauty, and is disgusted in two weeks that she has not turned out an intellectual companion. Why a good man, but _not_ an _intellectual_ one, marries a "strong-minded woman," and instantly sets about teaching her that obedience and silence are the first duties of wives. Why young men should decline marriage on the score that "they cannot afford it," when they spend more than would support a family, on their vices. Why a man with the proportions of Hercules should have a voice like a squeaking door-hinge, and a lovely girl deafen you every time she opens her rosebud mouth. In short, why, when men and women are such natural curiosities--singly or in groups, married or celibate--should showmen, at such cost of outlay, stock their premises with anacondas and giraffes, when their fellow-critters "would be so rich" an exhibition?

But think as long and as industriously as I may on these vexed questions, no solution comes. I turn them over to some philosopher who will unravel the skein while I take an evening sail upon the lake. In fact, when I get _there_, I don't care what becomes of my kind so that my sunset sail is not denied me. Nor is this as selfish as it seems, since I should not be safe company for them in the dog-days without this soothing process. Keep close to the sh.o.r.e now, oh, boatman: and above all, keep silence. Pickerel are good in their way, but bony; and I would fain listen dreamily to the plashing oar, and the twit-twit of the little birds as they seek their nests in the trees, while my eye rests on the changing clouds and their reflections in the smooth mirror below.

Vex me not with talk of "dead swells" and "whitecaps." I would sail here till midnight in silence, and thence straight into the other world, before a ripple of earthly fret came over my spirit.

But it is not to be. One of our party "wants to pick pond-lilies," slimy and smell-less; _not_ like the dear old pond-lilies in Ma.s.sachusetts, though mockingly like in form and color. Another is yelling at an echo, which answers back as persistently as if it were of the feminine gender; but, unlike the feminine gender, always _agrees_ colloquially. Another pokes me up from my reverie to know "why I am so stupid?" And now when the shadows are loveliest and the moon beginning to silver the lake, the universal voice is "to land." Let them go. Good riddance! Two of us stay with the boatman. Now flash up the Northern lights! Now appears the evening star, crowning yonder hill, and twinkling defiantly in the very face of the new moon. Plucky star! That's right! to take for your motto that of America--_Room and freedom for all_.

"What will we _ever_ do when we get back to New York?" dolefully asked little Bright Eyes of me, the other day, as she came in with her ap.r.o.n full of mosses and flowers. That's just it. That's what _I_ want to know. No cool lake awaits me there at eventide, on whose broad expanse one can float into serenity. But instead, gas-lighted, unventilated public a.s.semblies, where vexed questions are agitated: and in place of bird-singing, inodorous streets, full of children whose "childhood" is a myth. And for the lovely fresh morning, with its aromatic odors, the whoop of milkmen, the rush of street cars, and the old maelstrom whirl of business, folly, and sin. My very soul sickens to think of it. I _won't_ think of it. I'll lay off and dream.

Every summer vacation I ask myself, why people who have no relish for country life doom themselves to yawn through six or eight weeks of it?

People who never move from a certain chair on the piazza save to migrate to their beds, or to the dining-table; who have neither eyes to see earth's glory, nor heart to be grateful for it, or ears open to its myriad musical voices--living discords amid all its harmony. If invalids, I can understand and pity their misfortune; but your fat, well-to-do, buxom men and women, who have no earthly impediment to their locomotion, and yet who live weeks in the vicinity of grand natural objects, and are just as dead to them as the ox in the meadow--why do they travel thousands of dusty miles to get to them? People who look pityingly at you, as you return exhilarated from your delicious rambles, as if to say, "_Poor lunatics!_" One turns from them to the children, to whom every daisy and blade of gra.s.s is a bright heaven, and counts sadly over their lost years. Also, I would like to ask, is there anything in the climate of Vermont which turns out such huge trees, mountains, and _men_, that dwarfs nearly all its womankind? Again: Do preserves and pills, flapjacks and ipecac, plum-cake and castor-oil, jelly and jalap have a natural affinity, that they are so often found in each other's company? In other words: Why do the country-women of New England waste their time in concocting the indigestible richness which everybody is better without, and which renders these drugs necessary? Half the time thus spent, if devoted to the manufactory of that rare commodity--sweet, wholesome bread--or to the best way of cooking meat so as to preserve its juices, would shut up the drug-shops, prolong their own lives and good looks, and make them a credit to the glorious country in which they are born. _Give us good bread_, my dear country-women. What else soever you pa.s.s over, _don't slight the bread_. It is the crying sin of the country, that if there are cakes and pies in plenty, the bread may be sour, or filled with saleratus, or so stale that a dog would not swallow it, or so "slack-baked" that one might as well eat dough. Now the digestion of an ostrich would fail on such fare as this. A healthy stomach revolts at it, and refuses to be put off with sweets and preserves. It is a crime to set such bread before _little children_, even if adult digestion were equal to it, which it is not. A great reform is needed here, and if I can help it on, I care not who boxes my ears for the attempt. To see human beings making and swallowing such messes, and then sending physic after it, like a detective, to clear it from the system, is a proceeding which should give them all a free pa.s.s to the Lunatic Asylum. There--now I feel better! While I am catechising, do you suppose there was ever an invalid who didn't b.u.t.ton-hole everybody, to recapitulate his or her symptoms, exhibit their tongues, and discuss patent medicines? It gets monotonous after a while, particularly when you know that they are bound personally to experiment on every pill, powder, and plaster that any heartless quack may invent to make a living. If half of them were to stop taking physic entirely, live on wholesome food, take plenty of fresh air and sleep, they would never know pain or ache. Don't the doctors know this, and laugh in their sleeves at it? And _does a doctor ever give drugs to his own family_? I think I have asked questions enough for the present, so we will consider the meeting adjourned.

_SPRING IN THE CITY._

There are those who like to begin the day vociferously; with demonstrative step and voice; with hurry and rush. I confess to a love of the serene, soft-stepping way in which Nature heralds in the day.

Soft skies, softer music; the gradual rolling up of night's mantle, and the genial warmth which steals imperceptibly about us. Oh, that sweet, quiet, devotional coming in of the new-born day! How I long for it, as the blades of gra.s.s begin to grow green, between the pavement-stones of the crazy city! How I tire of its quips and pranks and circus-clown-tumblings. How stale grow its jests! How I pant for freedom outside its artificial, heated walls! How disgusting is the road woman must travel to secure all this happiness! Woollens and furs to be put safely out of reach of moths. House-cleaning and carpet-shaking to be done. Dresses to be bought, and horror! worse than all, to be fitted.

Trunks to be packed--writing to be done, weeks ahead. My brain spins to think what a purgatory one must travel through, to reach that serene heaven, the bird-peeping-morning-hour of the country; when n.o.body comes to me with horrible questions about meat and b.u.t.ter. When as soon as my shoes and stockings are on, and before the dew is off, or the lovely mist done creeping off the mountains, Nature's cool hand is laid on my temples, and I give _her_ the best of me. With my head on her bosom, I forget all that is askew in life and rest there contented with the present; like the babe who dreams not that its mother will presently loose its hand from her neck, and disappear while yet the trance continues.

If I am sentimental, forgive me; but sometimes I sigh to think how much of life goes to consideration of food and clothes. Now, while I sojourned in a tent on the James river, during the war, I used to lie in my cot, and consider these things among others. There were just the cot, a rough pine table, and my trunk, for furniture. I had only to wash my face and hands in the tin basin of water that Sambo slipped under the tent every morning, and all those bothering, small considerations were disposed of for the day.

There was no carpet there to be swept--there were no pictures or china to look after. Sambo made my bed, while I went into another tent to breakfast; and the fighting was going on outside, which was to leave it optional with Sambo about handing tin-basins of water to white folks.

All that suited me. Life under these circ.u.mstances seemed to have something in it. I felt dignified to be alive, and thanked my father and mother for it.

We have finished the war since then. I am not sorry for that, but life in that tent has spoiled me for parlor fripperies. That's the worst of it. I keep all the time asking everybody if they don't think we should be a great deal happier without all these artificial wants, that so wear our spirits and souls out. Bless you, they all say, yes; but they keep going on all the same, and I suppose I shall.

A WOMAN'S MOTION.--I rise to make a proposition. It is this: that the name and denomination, and the name of the pastor, of our respective churches, should be neatly placed beside the princ.i.p.al entrance door, that strangers may be able to find those churches they desire. Why not?

as well as the name of the s.e.xton and his residence, which we find upon nearly all our churches. I won't charge anything for the hint, provided it is carried out. The thought came to me as I was touched upon the arm by a stranger the other Sunday, in the porch of a New York church, and asked, "Of what denomination is the pastor here?" I had to rub my head to remember, for creeds and denominations find little lodgment there.

Provided I find Christianity, that's enough for me, and to my thinking, no one church has the monopoly of that.

_WAIFS._

Did you ever try to rid yourself of a thing you did not want? An old glove or a faded knot of ribbon, or a bit of lace? After Bettina has picked it up, and with honest delight returned it as a missing valuable, and every adult and minor in the house has taken his or her turn in depositing it carefully on your table, were you ever driven "clean"

demented by the dust-man ringing the area bell, with the article in question, thinking, deluded philanthropist, that he had performed a virtuous action? Go where you may, can you rid yourself of it? Don't it turn up between the covers of books, and stare at you from bureau drawers, and appear simultaneously with your pocket-handkerchief on some august occasion from your robe pocket? Will water quench it, or fire burn it? Don't it always fly up chimney unharmed by the sparks, and watch an opportunity to re-enter at the area door? When you go out, don't it frisk along the gutter, timing itself to your steps, slow or quick; or eddy round your head in a gust of wind, and finally get blown back upon your door-step, where it persists in lodging, spite of brooms and Bettys, till you get as nervous about it as if it were some relentless enemy, d.o.g.g.i.ng your every step? Perhaps all this while you are hunting every nook and corner vainly to find some article you _really_ want, and which persistently keeps out of your way, or at least until you have given it up, and replaced it with a duplicate, when it takes that occasion suddenly to appear, and innocently to confront you, from a fold in an arm-chair, or sofa, or from the corner of a carpet.

When I experience these trials, I no longer marvel at the clutching fingers thrust through the grated windows of lunatic asylums, or the unearthly howls of rage or peals of wild laughter with which these unfortunates give vent to their feelings. I no longer smile at the annoyed man who, waking one fine spring morning, and looking at the fresh gra.s.s, exclaimed, "What! _Green again!_ and--_blue_--his brains (?) out."

PARTIAL JUDGMENT.--How few people are gifted with the faculty of seeing round a corner; in other words, looking at both sides of a question before deciding! Those who have _not_ this gift are always sinning, and always repenting; always a.s.serting, and always retracting. They may have many estimable qualities, and yet, their house being built on such a sandy foundation, one hesitates before entering it; or, if he makes up his mind to do so, it is with the deliberate expectation that he may possibly be buried under its ruins.

_TACT._

I'm not particularly good at definitions, but I know what tact is not.

It is not tact to sit down by the side of a person grieving for the dead, and tell them how much more comfortable life would now be to them, did they not love so strongly; and how much wiser, could they only be more diffusive in their attachments, and concentrate less; so that when the c.r.a.pe flutters from the door, one could coolly say: "Yes, it is true--he or she is dead and gone; and there's no help for it; let us turn to something else and be jolly."

It is not tact to tell a mother, who has an idiotic or deformed child, how smart, and sweet, and bright are your own; with what a zest they enter into rollicksome sports; how apt they are to learn, and how brilliant may be their own and your future.

It is not tact, if you have an acquaintance, who only by the most rigid and painstaking economy can maintain a presentable appearance, to make a call on such, in an elaborate toilet, with manners to match.

It is not tact to embarra.s.s persons of limited education, and little reading, by conversing upon topics of which they can by no possibility know anything, save that you have the advantage of them in that regard.

It is not tact, in the presence of an invalid, to dilate upon savory dishes, and the pleasures of the table. It is not tact to converse with an editor upon a quiet, peaceful life; or with a compelled auth.o.r.ess upon the safe and uninvaded sanct.i.ties of the fireside for women.

The most astounding instance of _tact_, is to listen, inwardly crucified, with a pleased air, to an old--_old_ joke, and a poor one at that: to improvise a laugh at the proper moment, and successfully to resist the malicious instinct to flatter the narrator, at the close, by saying: "Yes, I have heard that before."