Gala-Days Part 2

"Doubtless," says honest, quaint, delightful Isaac,--and he never spoke a truer word,--"doubtless G.o.d might have made a better berry than a strawberry, but doubtless G.o.d never did."

The bill of fare rated their excellence at fifteen cents.

"Not unreasonable," I pantomimed.

"Not if I pay for them," replied Halicarna.s.sus.

Then we sat and amused ourselves after the usual brilliant fashion of people who are waiting in hotel parlors, railroad-stations, and restaurants. We surveyed the gilding and the carpet and the mirrors and the curtains. We hazarded profound conjectures touching the people a.s.sembled. We studied the bill of fare as if it contained the secret of our army's delay upon the Potomac, and had just concluded that the first crop of strawberries was exhausted, and they were waiting for the second crop to grow, when Hebe hove in sight with her nectared ambrosia in a pair of cracked, browny-white saucers, with browny-green silver spoons. I poured out what professed to be cream, but proved very low-spirited milk, in which a few disheartened strawberries appeared rari nantes. I looked at them in dismay. Then curiosity smote me, and I counted them. Just fifteen.

"Cent a piece," said Halicarna.s.sus.

I was not thinking of the cent, but I had promised myself a feast; and what is a feast, susceptible of enumeration? Cleopatra was right.

"That love"--and the same is true of strawberries--"is beggarly which can be reckoned." Infinity alone is glory.

"Perhaps the quality will atone for the quant.i.ty," said Halicarna.s.sus, scooping up at least half of his at one "arm-sweep."

"How do they taste?" I asked.

"Rather coppery," he answered.

"It is the spoons!" I exclaimed, in a fright. "They are German silver!

You will be poisoned!" and knocked his out of his hand with such instinctive, sudden violence that it flew to the other side of the room, where an old gentleman sat over his newspaper and dinner.

He started, dropped his newspaper, and looked around in a maze.

Halicarna.s.sus behaved beautifully,--I will give him the credit of it.

He went on with my spoon and his strawberries as unconcernedly as if nothing had happened. I was conscious that I blushed, but my face was in the shade, and n.o.body else knew it; and to this day I've no doubt the old gentleman would have marvelled what sent that mysterious spoon rattling against his table and whizzing between his boots, had not Halicarna.s.sus, when the uproar was over, conceived it his duty to go and pick up the spoon and apologize for the accident, lest the gentleman should fancy an intentional rudeness. Partly to reward him for his good behavior, partly because I never did think it worth while to make two bites of a cherry, and partly because I did not fancy being poisoned, I gave my fifteen berries to him. He devoured them with evident relish.

"Does my spoon taste as badly as yours?" I asked.

"My spoon?" inquired he, innocently.

"Yes. You said before that they tasted coppery."

"I don't think," replied this unprincipled man,--"I don't think it was the flavor of the spoon so much as of the coin which each berry represented."

If we could only have been at home!

I never made a more unsatisfactory investment in my life than the one I made in that restaurant. I felt as if I had been swindled, and I said so to Halicarna.s.sus. He remarked that there was plenty of cream and sugar. I answered curtly, that the cream was chiefly water, and the sugar chiefly flour; but if they had been Simon Pure himself, was it anything but an aggravation of the offence to have them with nothing to eat them on?

"You might do as they do in France,--carry away what you don't eat, seeing you pay for it."

"A pocketful of milk and water would be both delightful and serviceable; but I might take the sugar," I added, with a sudden thought, upsetting the sugar-bowl into a "Boston Journal" which we had bought in the train. "I can never use it, but it will be a consolation to reflect on."

Halicarna.s.sus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of base. He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but I did. I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction; and Halicarna.s.sus paid his thirty cents, looking--and feeling, as he afterwards told me--as if a policeman's grip were on his shoulders. If any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take this occasion to explain the phenomenon. I gave the sugar afterwards to a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off the dust of my feet against Boston at the "B. & W. R. R. D."

Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. It has three streets: Cornhill, Washington, and Beacon Streets. It has a Common and a Frog-pond, and many sprightly squirrels. Its streets are straight, and cross each other like lines on a chess-board. It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in the world or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emanc.i.p.ation was issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington and School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the "Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of chaste, compact, and cla.s.sic elegance. In politics, it was a Webster Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart waited for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting. Boston is called the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.

I spent two hours and half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay on the shining hills, and scattered benedictions. Plenty smiled up from a thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes, trod heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth. Kindly cows stood in the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to G.o.d in their dumb, fumbling way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the plains, little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them, and no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight through the piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in among the robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed inexorable, and made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but not for that was the music hushed, nor did one color fade. Brooks leaped in headlong chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and glided whispering beneath the sorrowful willows. Old trees renewed their youth in the slight, tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril, and, leaping lightly above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine, swaying dreamily in the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill nor forest but sent up a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker. Not an ox or cow or lamb or bird living its own dim life but lent its charm of unconscious grace to the great picture that unfolded itself mile after mile, in ever fresher loveliness to ever unsated eyes. Well might the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of G.o.d shout for joy, when first this grand and perfect world swung free from its moorings, flung out its spotless banner, and sailed majestic down the thronging skies. Yet, though but once G.o.d spoke the world to life, the miracle of creation is still incomplete. New every spring-time, fresh every summer, the earth comes forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not only in the dawn of our history, but now in the full brightness of its noonday, may we hear the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I look out upon the gray degraded fields left naked of the snow, and inwardly ask, Can these dry bones live again? And while the question is yet trembling on my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and beauty thrills into bloom. Who shall lack faith in man's redemption, when every year the earth is redeemed by unseen hands, and death is lost in resurrection?

To Fontdale sitting among her beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly on. There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the dark when I can help it. I love it. There is no solitude in the world, or at least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the doorway of the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the darkness,--darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could be sure of rushing on till daylight doth appear! But with the frightful and not remote possibility of bringing up in a crash and being buried under a general huddle, one prefers daylight. You may not be able to get out of the huddle even by daylight; but you will at least know where you are, if there is anything of you left. So at Fontdale, Halicarna.s.sus branches off temporarily on a business errand, and I stop for the night a-cousining.

You object to this? Some people do. For my part, I like it. You say you will not turn your own house or your friend's house into a hotel.

If people wish to see you, let them come and make a visit; if you wish to see them, you will go and make them one; but this touch and go,--what is it worth? O foolish Galatians! much every way. For don't you see, supposing the people are people you don't like, how much better it is to have them come and sleep or dine and be gone than to have them before your face and eyes for a week? An ill that is temporary is tolerable. You could entertain the Evil One himself, if you were sure he would go away after dinner. The trouble about him is not so much that he comes as that he won't go. He hangs around. If you once open your door to him, there is no getting rid of him; and some of his followers, it must be confessed, are just like him. You must resist them both, or they will never flee. But if they do flee after a day's tarry, do not complain. You protest against turning your house into a hotel. Why, the hotelry is the least irksome part of the whole business, when your guests are uninteresting. It is not the supper or the bed that costs, but keeping people going after supper is over and before bedtime is come. Never complain, if you have nothing worse to do than to feed or house your guests for a day or an hour.

On the other hand, if they are people you like, how much better to have them come so than not to at all! People cannot often make long visits,--people that are worth anything,--people who use life; and they are the only ones that are worth anything. And if you cannot get your good things in the lump, are you going to refuse them altogether? By no means. You are going to take them by driblets, and if you will only be sensible and not pout, but keep your tin pan right side up, you will find that golden showers will drizzle through all your life. So, with never a nugget in your chest, you shall die rich. If you can stop over-night with your friend, you have no sand-grain, but a very respectable boulder. For a night is infinite. Daytime is well enough for business, but it is little worth for happiness. You sit down to a book, to a picture, to a friend, and the first you know it is time to get dinner, or time to eat it, or time for the train, or you must put out your dried apples, or set the bread to rising, or something breaks in impertinently and chokes you at flood-tide. But the night has no end. Everything is done but that which you would be forever doing.

The curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled into exquisite soft shadowiness. All the world is far off. All its din and dole strike into the bank of darkness that envelops you and are lost to your tranced sense. In all the world are only your friend and you, and then you strike out your oars, silver-sounding, into the sh.o.r.eless night.

But the night comes to an end, you say. No, it does not. It is you that come to an end. You grow sleepy, clod that you are. But as you don't think, when you begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is just the same as if you never did. For you have no foreshadow of an inevitable termination to your rapture, and so practically your night has no limit. It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other end floats off into eternity. And there really is no abrupt termination. You roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness into the bosom of another happiness,--sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is bliss just as truly as society to the lonely. What in the distance would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your happiness is continuous. Just as it is in mending. Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have a way--which in time fossilizes into a principle--of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the wash,--a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used, namely, as applied to what is worth economizing. Time, happiness, life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But I see people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave the user worse than they found him. This I call waste and wicked prodigality. Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of no importance. Where these things can minister to the mind and heart, they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the appet.i.te or the vanity, or any foolish and hurtful l.u.s.t, they are foolish and hurtful. Be thrifty of comfort. Never allow an opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence, for kind of good, to go unimproved. Consider seriously whether the syrup of your preserves or juices of your own soul will do the most to serve your race. It may be that they are compatible,--that the concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as to which it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once a soul, forever a soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say.

Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are worthless. It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life that they acquire value.

So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to fritter away your time over old clothes. You precipitate yourself unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing. For you are not going to put your stockings on. Perhaps you will not need your b.u.t.tons for a week, and in a week you may have pa.s.sed beyond the jurisdiction of b.u.t.tons. But even if you should not, let the b.u.t.tons and the holes alone all the same. For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing which you will do instead is a funded capital, which will roll you up a perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever abolished. I say forever, because, when you have gone without the b.u.t.ton awhile, the inconvenience it occasions will reconcile you to the necessity of sewing it on,--will even go further, and make it a positive relief amounting to positive pleasure. Besides, every time you use it, for a long while after, you will have a delicious sense of satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete cessation of a dull, continuous pain. Thus what was at best characterless routine, and most likely an exasperation, is turned into actual delight, and adds to the sum of life. This is thrift. This is economy. But, alas!

few people understand the art of living. They strive after system, wholeness, b.u.t.tons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.

--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I started for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good in tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and begin new at Fontdale.

We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a beautiful--HAVE, did I say? Alas! Troy WAS. But I must not antic.i.p.ate--a beautiful veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for penance, but a silken, gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's cheek.

Yet everybody fleers at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody looks at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes great eyes at it, and says, "What in the world--" and ends with a huge, bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature at being forced to confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth of my nail than any of its contemporaries. In fact, it is two yards long. That is all. Halicarna.s.sus fired the first gun at it by saying that its length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the other end went with me, so that neither of us should get lost. This is an allusion to a habit which I and my property have of finding ourselves individually and collectively left in the lurch. After this initial shot, everybody considered himself at liberty to let off his rusty old blunderbuss, and there was a constant peppering. But my veil never lowered its colors nor curtailed its resources. Alas! what ridicule and contumely failed to effect, destiny accomplished.

Softness and plenitude are no shields against the shafts of fate.

I went into the station waiting-room to write a note. I laid my bonnet, my veil, my packages upon the table. I wrote my note. I went away. The next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my journey, there was no veil. I remembered that I had taken it into the station the night before, and that I had not taken it out. At the station we inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it. It is as much as your life is worth to ask these people about lost articles. They take it for granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of stealing. "Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?" asked Crene, her sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips.

"No, I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it," says Gnome, with magnificent indifference.

"It was lost here last night," continues Crene, in a soliloquizing undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.

"I do' know nothin' about it. _I_ 'a'n't took it"; and the Gnome tosses her head back defiantly. "I seen the lady when she was a-writin' of her letter, and when she went out ther' wa'n't nothin'

left on the table but a hangkerchuf, and that wa'n't hern. I do' know nothin' about it, nor I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it."

O no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since no one accused or even suspected you, why could you not have been less aggressive and more sympathetic in your a.s.sertions? But we will plough no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a rock and grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,--my ample, historic, heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered through--I will not say STOLEN tissue, but certainly through tissue which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair equivalent.

Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds say to her, "O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours," and still sighingly, "not yours! Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"? I believe I am wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because n.o.body of taste could surrept.i.tiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister, and there are two women,--nay, since n.i.g.g.ardly souls have no sense of grandeur, and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister, and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at very moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad under the silken shadows of my veil! And yet there are people who profess to disbelieve in total depravity.

Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes,--so pretty to look at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are,--had not Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting into a baggage-crate, and trundling off towards the Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a formidable hitch in the programme. A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps. I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel. The case did not admit of a doubt. There was the little insurmountable check, whose brazen lips could speak no lie.

"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have drawn it from me.

"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.

I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.

"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."

"But it went away on that track," says Crene.

"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have carried it away over there just to make it go wrong."

For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental impossibility should have gone in any other, and have it times enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I suppose it did." But Crene is not to be a.s.serted into yielding one inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is thoroughly unmanageable. The baggage-master, in anguish of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--

"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?"